This year’s MCA Food to Go conference unveiled the key growth drivers, future trends and exciting developments shaping the sector. It highlighted everything from innovative technology and formats to trendsetting menus and marketing, ultimately exploring how successful brands are navigating market challenges.
At the conference, I showcased transaction trends and growth opportunities emerging in 2026 based on three months of data from CACI’s Brand Dimensions dataset. By tracking 30+ food to go brands from November 2025 to January 2026, I assessed the trends and opportunities fuelling growth questions this year.
Here is what the data revealed.
Food to Go transaction trends & growth opportunities in 2026
The findings showed:
- +6% YoY revenue growth in the Cafés & Coffee Shop market
- A slight decrease in Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) transactions, but a slight increase in Average Transaction Value (ATV)
- Transactions and revenue dropping across the wider F&B sector
Which brands are leading industry trends in 2026?
From the 30+ up-and-coming and major players in the food to go sector tracked, I identified the leading brands as those achieving YoY growth above inflation and sorted them by increase in growth percentage.
Premium healthy lunches: Atis & Farmer J
Consumers continue to prioritise premium healthy lunches this year.
The leading brands were Atis, growing 140%, and Farmer J, growing ~30%. Atis’ skyrocketing growth is driven by the opening of a third new space in the last year. While substantial and impressive, it is the smallest brand in CACI’s Food to Go tracker, meaning the overall GBP shift in the market is small.
The largest share of the customer mix for these brands comes from CACI’s Acorn profiles Prosperous Professionals at 15% of spend followed by Up-and-coming Urbanites at 11%.
For new entrants, the challenge to growth is proving value in each transaction, precise targeting and mission expansion without undermining the brand or cannibalising sales.
Continued growth in chicken QSR: Popeyes, Wingstop & Slims
Consumers continue to seek indulgence and novelty. In the chicken QSR sector, our findings concluded Popeyes grew ~30%, Wingstop ~20% and Slims ~9% (who were +46% in the first quarter of the year). While this may counter the premium healthy lunch trend, consumers are finding ways to balance health-conscious choices with indulgent ones.
Caffeine & matcha on the rise: Blank Street & Grind
Both Blank Street and Grind grew over 20%, indicative of the brands’ innovative products, strong social media presence and matcha-led menus. These brands have evidently appealed to younger, experience-driven consumers by creating excitement through their product innovation.
Established brands are driving growth by harnessing loyalty
The biggest takeaway is that while new entrants win on excitement, established brands win on loyalty.
New brands have brought excitement, and with that, percentage growth, but most saw YoY growth rates slow across the year. Meanwhile, more established brands like Pret a Manger, Costa, Starbucks and McDonald’s saw stronger growth in the latest quarter. When assessing actual pounds versus percentage growth, established brands are back growing and seeing very substantial sales gains. This reiterates the impact of loyalty on long-term growth.
The formula of the current state of the market then becomes:
Excitement = short-term percentage growth. Loyalty = long-term monetary growth.
New brands, social media influence and new cuisine are fuelling excitement. Loyalty is driven by familiarity, perceived value, brand resonance and communication. Brands that can achieve a sweet spot between both are poised for sustainable growth. However, our findings suggest tension between excitement and loyalty. This prompts brands to reflect on how to maintain excitement or build customer loyalty.
Four strategies to drive growth in a tough climate
1) Having the right products in place
Brands must understand how to appeal to existing customers and excite new ones. Product and menu innovation should be strategically considered to open new missions and tailor to the right locations, dayparts and missions.
2) Getting the right space
While growth can be achieved by acquiring new spaces, established brands are always optimising their spaces to reach the right people, in the right place, at the right time. This is why some brands are shifting to drive-through locations as town centres decline and why many have opted to offer FMCG products in the chilled sections of supermarkets.
3) Appealing to customers through the right message
Tailored content sent to the right target group at the right time with the right incentive is critical to success.
4) Delivering with the right service
Profitably staffing each location, determining which locations will best suit trialling self-service kiosks and avoiding alienating or upsetting customers who value your brand’s personal service are critical considerations.
This is often easier in the new entry “excitement” phase, but new and established entrants must constantly evaluate that they have the right mix of these factors to remain relevant in a rapidly changing market. Each of these strategies has a ‘people, place and time’ lever that can be pulled to maximise growth by leveraging customer loyalty.
How CACI’s Brand Dimensions can help your Food to Go business thrive
With so much complexity in the food to go sector, brands need more than just internal customer data to keep on top of the mix. Supplementary market data through CACI’s Brand Dimensions can help you answer your growth questions, combining the right data with the right tools to project long-term growth through the right mix of products, services, places and messaging.
Highly detailed, timestamped transaction data is at the heart of Brand Dimensions, indicating anonymised customers and specific outlets to infill any data gaps and gain unique performance and competitor outlet insights.
When combined with anonymised mobile activity data and demographic classifications, it creates a cohesive base to address the people, place and time levers driving growth. This can also be topped off with lifestyle attributes linked to those demographics, competitor location data and competitor sentiment data.
Through this, businesses can better prepare for the future by understanding consumer behaviour at brand level.
Although Brand Dimensions is typically tracked on a monthly basis, these findings have been summarised quarterly for this blog.
If your brand could benefit from these data insights, book a Brand Dimensions demo with us.