Restaurants are a young persons’ game. There’s a mutually beneficial relationship between the industry and young people. They have a harder time getting hired in other industries due to age, inexperience, varied scheduling needs, etc. The industry needs people who can do physical work, often with abnormal hours and schedules. 60% of restaurant workers are under the age of 35 compared to only 35% of the overall employed workforce.
The NY Time’s recent article on aging highlights yet another looming challenge for the restaurant industry. And it’s not very far in the future.
The US starts to transition from a largely working age population to an aging one in 2025! In 2010 only 7 states had a median age over 40. 20 states will as of 2030. An aging global population will impact nearly every position in a restaurant. The most immediate impacts on the workforce will be for Servers/Waitstaff, Bartenders and Counter Workers. These positions are already suffering from major shortages coming out of the pandemic. The impact of aging will be felt more slowly in kitchens as these are often positions filled by non-native English speakers, often from Central & South America. The aging trends begin to hit many of these countries over the next 20-30 years.
There are more immediate challenges to the restaurant industry but perhaps none more impactful than an aging world. Japan has been dealing with this trend for the last 10-15 years. The median age there is almost 48, by far the oldest in the world. Japan has leaned on immigration and automation as a means of dealing with a worker shortage of over 6M people.
Japan has historically had very low immigration. There are a lot of factors contributing to this but most point to ethnic and cultural homogeneity, a strong national identity, a complex language not spoken elsewhere, and strict immigration policy. Japanese restaurants are relying more heavily than ever on foreign workers, mostly Vietnamese, to address labor shortages. A 2018 Nikkei survey of 224 restaurant companies found that 19.8% of them expected to hire foreign workers, up from 8.7% in 2016. Like the US, Japan struggles to adapt their immigration laws to address their population challenges.
There’s a long history of automation in Japanese restaurants dating back to the sushi conveyor belt in the ‘50’s. That innovation arose to lower labor costs and combat the extremely high cost of sushi grade fish. Now machines are cooking and shaping rice, cooking custards and frying seafood, but for different reasons. It seems likely Japan will leverage their experience to become a leader in foodservice robotics manufacturing as the rest of the world begins to deal with worker shortages driven by aging.
Immigration and automation are the US best tools to deal with this challenge. There’s not much cause for optimism on the immigration side. The last major immigration reform was in 1986 and every attempt at comprehensive reform in this century has failed. The demagoguery on the right makes any chance of reform very unlikely anytime soon. The Biden administration’s efforts have a very ‘2 step forward, 3 step back’ vibe to them.
Depending on your perspective, there’s probably more reason to hope on the automation side. Chipotle and Sweetgreen have been in the news lately for their automation efforts. Chipotle for their Autocado and Sweetgreen for the Infinite Kitchen Prototype. Both cite rising labor costs and shortages as reasons for automation. Aging trends will turbocharge both of these reasons. It’s going to be a few years before the most advanced automation and robotics becomes affordable to the non-billion dollar value restaurant community. That said, it will get much cheaper, almost all technology does as it matures.
As a restaurant owner, it’s scary to see these aging trends and foresee their impact on employment in the industry. Any chance that the post-pandemic labor challenges will dissipate is unlikely in the face of the seismic shift in demographics. Immigration and automation are the most likely tools to address this trend but neither is coming around the corner. In the meantime we’ll have to seek innovation within service styles and menu offerings, areas that are more within our grasp as operators.