2024 Predictions
Or maybe predishes or wishdictions
I look forward to the barrage of prediction lists that come up at the end of each year. New year predictions feel of a kind with peppermint lattes, Mariah Carey, and ‘is Die Hard a Christmas Movie’ arguments; they mark a season. I’ve thought and written a good bit about the forces that are impacting restaurants at every level. These predictions definitely reflect those forces and are also admittedly influenced by things I hope will or won’t happen in 2024 and beyond. Here we go:
Sidework as a Service: The newly reinforced and upheld 80/20 rule for restaurant work will cause entire new services focused on outsourcing sidework. This 80/20 rule, in short, says restaurant workers cannot spend more than 20% of their time on ‘tip supporting’ work, aka sidework. The rule further clarifies that tipped workers cannot spend more than 30 minutes consecutively on sidework.
Most restaurants I know have in times that would not align with this rule, especially if they are dinner only. This will give rise to third party services doing sidework remotely or in-house, much like a cleaning company or linen service. I also think this will lead to broadliners like Sysco, US Foods, and big paper companies getting into things like silverware rollups. See Napsin as an early entrant.
Kitchen Exhaust/Hood/Make-up Air Innovations: Return to office is stuck at about 50% of pre-pandemic levels. A lot of resources are going into understanding how to repurpose office space and residential conversions are much harder than one might think. Restaurants and other food uses will be a significant part of the repurposing as they are in all commercial real estate these days, even on upper floors. This is where the totally un-sexy topic of exhaust comes in. Retrofitting kitchen exhaust and make-up air into existing office buildings is extremely expensive. Captive-aire or a similar company will figure out how to do this efficiently given the potential money at stake in it.
Old People, Good Food: More people will turn 65 in 2024 than any year in history. Seriously, somebody actually trademarked ‘Peak 65’. Baby boomers are the first ‘foodie’ generation and also the wealthiest generation ever. They will demand good food in retirement, assisted living, and palliative care. This will be a boon for destination worthy fine dining as these people travel to eat more in the early years of retirement. Chefs, meal kit providers, and institutional food service providers will all go hard capturing their share of this market.
Wine Knock Offs: A study came out earlier this month where researchers at the University of Geneva used machine learning to teach an algorithm to identify Bordeaux wine estates. The algorithm correctly guessed which chateaux the wines were from 100 percent of the time. Wine forgery isn’t new and this technology will probably be used to detect frauds. But it will also be used to reverse engineer great wines to try and recreate them. The quality will probably be bad early on but I’m willing to bet it will get really good, pretty fast.
Video Game & Food Collabs: Over 50% of people under 49 say they play video games often or sometimes. I think this will lead to more collaborations between video game makers and restaurants, especially around big game releases. Shake Shack x Final Fantasy VII x Ubereats feels inevitable.
Peak Chefcore: Peak chefcore fashion will be reached around the premiere of The Bear Season 3, late-ish summer 2024. Aprons abound in the 2024 spring runway shows. Less haute couture but still celebrating food and fashion together, check out Flanlabs.
Property Management & Restaurants Collide: The buzziest word in real estate seems to be HOSPITALITY. Between remote work, social media, and streaming, it takes a lot to get people out of their houses these days. 2024 and 2025 lease expirations dwarf the previous few years (see chart below). Developers and property managers are all talking about hospitality as a differentiator necessary to pry people out. Property management companies like JLL, Colliers, CBRE, etc. will work much more closely with, invest in, and maybe even acquire restaurant brands when they realize hospitality is not their core competency. Or maybe the great hotel brands get into office property management? Would people be more apt to go to an office run by The Four Seasons?
Uber Gets Deeper Into Restaurants: Uber is killing it by most measures. They recently joined the S&P 500, exceed the total market cap of all of their competitors (combined) and are profitable. 46% of Q3 revenue came from the delivery side of the business, almost equalling the ride side. This deepening will definitely come in part from advertising, bleeding restaurants for attention on the platform. I hope Uber gets involved with whatever comes next as the ghost kitchen bubble continues to deflate. I also like the idea of this prediction merging with the 80/20 prediction to ‘gigify’ sidework.
San Francisco- Most Exciting Food City: San Francisco was always one of the best food cities in America but in the last 10 years it feels like it’s been surpassed by Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, etc. I think this is in part because it got so expensive nothing interesting could afford to happen there. In 2023 SF became the poster child for the Urban Doom Loop. Vacancies and the general emptying out of the urban core could create more affordable opportunities for restaurant creativity.
Something Big from Big Food: Ok- this is not really a prediction but one or more of the companies below is going to make a big move in 2024 in the face of changing consumption habits. With reduced calorie and alcohol consumption huge CPG food companies will have to diversify in ways that can’t help but impact restaurants. Maybe Pepsico or Coke get’s into the no-alcohol beverage space aggressively and brings that movement to the public en masse. Or one of these companies acquires a ton of Sweetgreen stock.
Scott Galloway says “Every year we make predictions for the coming year. We try to get them right, but the real objective is to catalyze a conversation.” In my case, it’s probably more likely than not that none of these things happen, at least not within a single year. That said, we need to catalyze new conversations around restaurants given the challenges and opportunities ahead of the industry.
Happy Holidays & Happy New Year!
Boom!!