Inside QSR
QSR traffic fell 15.5% in January 2022 and 18.4% in June 2023 compared to pre-pandemic levels. Here's the sourced data, what drove it, and the six operational levers that separated winners from losers.
By Justin K. Sellers · 18 min read · March 17, 2026
Nearly 30% of all restaurant visits in 2025 were driven by a deal or promotion.
That is the highest rate in 50 years — higher than the financial crisis of 2008, higher than the post-COVID pressure of 2022, higher than any point in modern QSR history.The industry looked at declining traffic and reached for its standard tool: discounts. Within months, every major chain was running a value campaign competing for the same price-sensitive customer. McDonald's $5 Meal Deal. KFC at 1990s pricing. Jack in the Box with a $4.99 Bonus Jack Combo. Burger King, Wendy's, Denny's, Pizza Hut, White Castle — all spending margin to buy visits they couldn't afford to sustain.
Circana tracked the result. Deal-seeking traffic grew 1% in the quarter ending June 2025. Total industry traffic declined during the same period.
The promotions were creating transactions. They were not building habits.
The industry had a demand problem. It treated the symptom. The real condition — the operations problem — stayed untouched. And the brands that figured that out before everyone else entered 2026 with advantages their competitors cannot close quickly.
This article documents what those brands did differently. Six operational levers. Twelve sources. Every number cited.
[STAT_CARDS] 30% | of All Orders in 2025 | Driven by Deal or Promotion — 50-Year High -0.3% | U.S. Foodservice Traffic | Full Year 2025 Decline $460M | Destroyed in 4 Years | Del Taco: Bought at $575M, Sold at $115M [/STAT_CARDS]
---
U.S. foodservice traffic fell 0.3% in 2025. The response was nearly universal: brands read the number as a price problem — consumers can't afford to eat out, so discount until they can.
The data doesn't support that reading.
"Traffic does not begin to recover until inflation rates subside, consumer sentiment improves, and consumers' reliance on deals lessens." — Circana, citing 50-year historical foodservice analysis
Circana's historical analysis is explicit: deal-seeking traffic surges during economic pressure and then recedes when conditions improve. Brands that build operational systems during the surge period come out of it with structural advantages. Brands that adapt their entire operating model to the surge get trapped in it.
Chili's — a full-service casual chain — beat McDonald's on same-store sales growth in 2025. Not with lower prices. With a clearer price. The $10.99 3-For-Me tells a customer exactly what they get, exactly what it costs, and exactly why it represents value. No app. No code. No expiration date. No ambiguity.
Jack in the Box CEO Lance Tucker acknowledged the failure directly on the Q3 2025 earnings call: "Our value equation was not resonating and lacked enough price point of value."
That's not a price problem. The prices were competitive. It's a clarity problem.
The brands that won 2025 built operational systems — GM retention programs, digital ordering infrastructure, value message discipline, unit economics standards — that create traffic automatically, without discounting. The brands that lost treated promotions as operations.
A promotion creates a transaction. An operational system creates a habit. Those are different things.
---
Black Box Intelligence, Circana, and public earnings data from brands that chose to be transparent identify six operational levers that separated QSR performance in 2025. Here is the summary. The analysis follows.
| Lever | Impact | Best-in-Class Example | |---|---|---| | GM Retention | Highest single correlation | Black Box Intelligence: +3.5pp SSS for operators who kept their GM | | Loyalty Programs | Proven traffic driver | Taco Bell: members 5.8 → 10.2 visits/yr (+76%) | | Value Clarity | Non-negotiable | Chili's $10.99 3-For-Me vs. Jack in the Box failure | | Digital Mix | Scales revenue per visit | Wingstop 72% digital; Taco Bell projecting +$225K AUV at 60% | | Menu Innovation Cadence | Traffic trigger, not a floor | Taco Bell doubled LTO cadence; chicken/beverage categories outperformed | | Unit Economics Discipline | Protects against decline | Taco Bell 24%+ margins vs. Del Taco 12.8% — same competitive market |
---
Black Box Intelligence's August 2025 performance data identified GM retention as the strongest single operational correlation with same-store sales and traffic — stronger than digital mix, stronger than loyalty program size, stronger than LTO cadence.
Full-service restaurants that kept their general manager for the prior 12 months saw same-store sales growth 3.5 percentage points higher than those that experienced GM turnover in the same period. Same-store traffic growth: 3.3 percentage points higher. BBI's September 2025 update confirmed the correlation held consistently throughout the year: retaining a GM correlates with +2pp stronger traffic.
This is not an HR finding. It is a performance finding. When a GM leaves, hourly retention drops, execution quality degrades, guest sentiment scores fall, and traffic follows. The replacement cost is separately documented: $9,500 in training costs alone, or $17,651 when all hard costs are included.
The highest single correlation to same-store sales performance in 2025 was not digital mix. It was not loyalty program size. It was whether the general manager was still in the building.
For investors evaluating QSR brands, GM turnover rate should be a line-item diligence question — not an HR afterthought. A brand running 40% GM turnover is not running a restaurant business. It is running a training program that periodically sells food.
For the full ROI math on what GM turnover actually costs per unit — the calculation most operators have never run — see our companion analysis on workforce economics and unit performance.
---
Loyalty programs work. The data is consistent: loyalty sales surged 34% in 2024 while non-loyalty sales were flat at -0.9%. At leading QSR chains, loyalty members account for half or more of total visits. 76% of QSR operators running loyalty programs report they increased traffic.
But the Wingstop case proves something the industry has largely missed: loyalty programs are not the input. They are the output.
The gap is not subtle.
[LOYALTY_GAP_CHART]
Wingstop CEO Michael Skipworth said it directly on the Q3 2025 earnings call:
"We have a best-in-class digital platform representing over 70% of sales, and we have amassed a database of over 60 million users, all without a loyalty program."
The conventional wisdom: brands launch loyalty programs to incentivize app downloads, which produce digital orders, which produce first-party data.
Wingstop ran this in reverse. They drove digital adoption first — by building an ordering experience customers preferred — and accumulated the data as a byproduct. Digital mix grew from 30.2% in 2019 to 72% in 2025. The database grew from near-zero to 60 million users over that same period. Without a single loyalty point being offered.
When Club Wingstop launched as a pilot in Q4 2025, it entered with 60 million profiled users. The results: nearly 50% of active guests in pilot markets enrolled immediately, frequency increased 7% among rewards customers, and over 30% of new guests signed up at their first visit.
Most brands launch a loyalty program to start collecting customer data. Wingstop collected the data first — for years — and then designed the program around what it already knew. That sequence is the competitive advantage. It cannot be replicated by launching an app in 2026.
The question is not: does this brand have a loyalty program? The question is: what percentage of this brand's transactions are digital — and who owns that data?
For the broader argument on why this data gap widens automatically every day — and what it means for operators evaluating franchise brands — The Moat Is Already Built makes that case in full. For the data ownership question specifically — who controls what your customers' ordering behavior generates — see our analysis on customer data in QSR. For a full breakdown of Wingstop's unit economics, franchise costs, and what operators actually earn at the unit level, see our Wingstop franchise deep dive.
CAVA relaunched its rewards program in October 2024, shifting from a transaction-based model to a points-based structure. By Q1 2025 — roughly six months in — the loyalty channel's share of total revenue had grown more than 200 basis points. The program was adding approximately 50,000 new members per week and approaching 8 million total members.
In October 2025, CAVA layered on tiered status levels — Sea, Sand, and Sun — and became the first restaurant brand in the industry to offer status matching to members of competing programs.
The +230 bps figure reflects the loyalty channel's share of total sales — a disclosed metric from CAVA's own earnings calls. That number is not frequency lift; it is the loyalty channel's growing share of the revenue mix. For a brand posting Q1 2025 revenue up 28.2% year-over-year and same-store sales up 10.8%, the loyalty contribution is compounding on top of already-strong underlying performance.
CAVA's trajectory illustrates that a loyalty program launched with the right data infrastructure can produce measurable revenue contribution within months, not years. The October 2025 tier addition — built on a year of behavioral data from the relaunched program — used the same sequencing principle as Wingstop: build the data first, then activate it.
Circana's June 2025 research contains a finding that directly challenges the most common investor assumption about loyalty programs.
Loyalty members visit 20 unique restaurant chains per year. Non-members also visit 20 unique restaurant chains per year. Enrollment in a loyalty program does not make a customer exclusive to that brand. It does not reduce the number of competitors they visit.
What it does: loyalty members visit brands they are enrolled in at twice the rate of non-members — allocating 8% of their total restaurant visits to that brand versus 4% for non-members.
[CALLOUT] The value of a loyalty program is not customer lock-in. The value is frequency share — a larger slice of a customer's existing restaurant budget, earned through a better experience, not exclusivity. [/CALLOUT]
The implication: a loyalty program at a brand with a mediocre product or inconsistent operations will not generate frequency share. Customers enrolled in 20 programs will simply visit the other 19 more often. This explains why Chipotle — with one of the largest and most sophisticated loyalty programs in fast casual — saw frequency decline in 2025. The program is well-built. The underlying experience challenge is what loyalty cannot fix.
---
Chili's was the brand story of 2025. Same-store sales growth outpaced the entire QSR category. Its $10.99 3-For-Me became the most-cited example of effective value messaging in the industry.
It is not a discount. It is a price point with clarity.
The $10.99 3-For-Me tells a customer exactly what they get, exactly what it costs, and exactly why it represents value. No ambiguity. No fine print. No expiration date creating urgency. No conditional requirement. A customer does not need to download an app, enter a code, or spend a minimum amount to unlock the offer.
"Value is really a losing track, just given the fact that you're doing lower margin, you're degrading the brand. It's not really the best strategy that restaurants can go with." — TD Cowen analyst, December 2025
Value clarity is an operational discipline, not a promotional strategy. It requires a brand to decide what it stands for at a specific price point — and build its entire menu architecture around communicating that clearly. The brands that did this in 2025 did not need emergency promotions when traffic dipped. Their value message was already understood.
---
The QSR industry frames digital ordering as a convenience play. That framing misses the more important economic effect.
Taco Bell's investor materials show that moving digital mix from 35% to 60% by 2030 is projected to add approximately $225,000 in incremental AUV per unit. That is not a visit count increase. It is a revenue-per-visit increase driven by higher check sizes, upsell conversion, and personalized offers that only function through digital channels.
Chipotle processed $3.9 billion in digital sales in 2025 — 35% of total sales. Wingstop hit 72% digital mix. For every brand at these digital penetration levels, the economics of each visit are structurally different from a brand running 15% to 20% digital. Those differences compound over time.
Digital mix is not a technology metric. It is a unit economics metric. A brand at 70% digital has a different check average, a different cost-to-serve, and a different data asset than a brand at 20% digital.
For the infrastructure context powering this compounding — the $270 billion AI data center build and what it means specifically for QSR operators — see The New Location Advantage.
---
Menu innovation drives footfall. Taco Bell doubled its menu innovation cadence in 2025 versus 2024 and saw same-store sales growth of 9% in Q1 2025 — a result its CEO described as remarkable given industry headwinds.
But menu innovation is a traffic trigger, not a traffic floor. It creates spikes. It does not sustain them. The brands that treated LTOs as a substitute for operational fundamentals found this out in 2025 — briefly elevated traffic that returned to baseline when the promotion ended.
The chicken category data is instructive. Wingstop, Raising Cane's, and Chick-fil-A all outperformed the QSR category in 2025. None of them won primarily through LTO velocity. They won through operational consistency in a category with strong underlying consumer demand.
The beverage boom — Dutch Bros, 7 Brew, Swig — is the same pattern applied to a different category. Strong product-market fit. Operational consistency. Growing consumer habit. Not promotional velocity.
---
The Del Taco case study is the starkest example in the 2025 dataset.
Jack in the Box Inc. acquired Del Taco in March 2021 for $575 million. Del Taco and Taco Bell operate in overlapping California-rooted markets and compete for similar consumers. They are not under the same parent company — Taco Bell is owned by Yum! Brands; Jack in the Box and Del Taco are separate publicly traded entities. But the unit economics comparison is direct: two Mexican QSR brands, same competitive environment, opposite margin outcomes.
In Q4 fiscal 2025, Del Taco's same-store sales fell 3.9%. Jack in the Box sold Del Taco to franchisee Yadav Enterprises for $115 million in October 2025 — a transaction representing a loss of $460 million versus the 2021 purchase price.
Meanwhile, Taco Bell held 24%+ restaurant-level margins in 2024 while simultaneously growing same-store sales and expanding its AUV from $1.6 million in 2019 to $2.2 million. The R.I.N.G. The Bell strategy targets 25% to 26% margins by 2030.
Del Taco was sold for $115 million in 2025. Jack in the Box paid $575 million for it in 2021. The $460 million difference is what four years of margin compression and declining traffic actually costs.
Unit economics discipline is not conservatism. It is the output of operational systems that generate traffic without discounting. Brands that lack those systems are forced to buy traffic at the cost of their margins. The compounding effect of that trade-off is visible in the Del Taco outcome over four years.
---
Starbucks has 34 million 90-day active loyalty members in the U.S. It is one of the most sophisticated rewards programs ever built in foodservice. And yet Starbucks entered 2025 posting its sixth consecutive quarter of same-store sales declines — driven by an 8% drop in transactions in North America.
The loyalty program did not cause the decline. But it did not prevent it either.
CEO Brian Niccol's diagnosis was direct:
"Focusing on loyalty members at the expense of infrequent customers is never healthy in a business." — Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, January 2026
The operational foundation had eroded underneath the loyalty infrastructure. Wait times had lengthened. Menu complexity had overwhelmed baristas. Mobile ordering had eliminated the in-store interaction that built the original Starbucks habit. Barista turnover had degraded consistency. The program had 34 million members. The experience they were re-enrolling in had deteriorated.
The recovery validates the diagnosis. By Q1 fiscal 2026 — the three months ending December 28, 2025 — Starbucks posted +4% global comparable store sales and +3% comparable transactions. Non-rewards customers delivered transaction growth year-over-year for the first time since the post-pandemic recovery. The turnaround was built on fixing operations: staffing, service speed, menu simplification, restoring the in-store experience. The loyalty program restructuring is still forthcoming.
Starbucks is the proof-of-concept for this article's central argument in both directions. Operations eroded — traffic declined despite 34 million loyalty members. Operations improved — traffic recovered before the loyalty program was even restructured. The sequence is the lesson.
---
McDonald's entered 2025 absorbing the Q4 2024 E. coli impact, which pushed domestic same-store sales to -1.4% in that quarter. That context matters for reading the full-year numbers.
The recovery built through the year. Q2 2025 U.S. same-store sales turned positive at +2.5%. Q4 2025 delivered +6.8% — aided by Monopoly and Grinch promotions that drove what CEO Chris Kempczinski called the brand's highest-ever single sales day, and lapping the E. coli quarter. For the full year, global comparable sales grew 3.1% and systemwide sales reached $139.4 billion, up 7%.
Loyalty systemwide sales grew 20% to $37 billion. 90-day active loyalty users reached 210 million at year-end, up 19%.
CFO Ian Borden attributed the structural recovery to loyalty infrastructure on the Q4 earnings call, citing the before/after frequency data: 10.5 visits per year before enrollment, 26 visits per year after — a +148% lift. That is not a promotional outcome. It is an operational outcome built on a data asset assembled over five years.
A note on the Q4 number: the +6.8% U.S. SSS figure partially laps the E. coli quarter. The full-year +3.1% is the cleaner number for evaluating structural performance. It incorporates the weak Q1 and shows compounding loyalty economics across a full calendar year.
---
Most franchise evaluations begin and end with AUV. That number is backward-looking. It reflects performance under conditions that included whatever operational infrastructure the brand had when the data was collected.
The six levers above suggest a different set of questions — ones that reveal whether a brand's traffic performance is structural or promotional:
[FRAMEWORK_LIST] What is the brand's GM retention rate, and what is the average GM tenure? | High turnover is a leading indicator of traffic underperformance that AUV does not yet reflect. A brand running 40% GM turnover is not stable. What percentage of transactions are digital — and does the brand own that data, or does a third-party aggregator? | The answer determines whether the brand has a data asset or a data liability. What is the brand's value message — and can a customer understand it in 10 seconds without a promotion code? | Value clarity is an operational discipline. Brands that cannot articulate it clearly will chase traffic with discounts indefinitely. What are restaurant-level margins — and what percentage depend on traffic generated by active promotions? | A brand at 18% margins running continuous LTO traffic is structurally different from a brand at 24% margins generating traffic through operational systems. What is the brand's digital mix trajectory — and at what rate is it growing? | A brand moving from 20% to 30% digital over three years is building the data infrastructure that enables everything else. A brand stuck at 15% is not. [/FRAMEWORK_LIST]
Every example in this article is a national system with capital to build proprietary tech stacks. That is not most of the operators reading QSR Research Hub.
The six levers apply at any scale — but the entry points look different.
GM retention is not a technology investment. It is a management practice. Operators at any unit count can track GM tenure, identify retention risks early, and calculate what turnover is actually costing them in hard training costs and performance degradation. The math on that question alone is worth running before any other operational investment. The full calculation is in our GM retention ROI companion piece.
Value clarity does not require a $50M proprietary platform. It requires a decision about what the brand stands for at a specific price point — and the discipline to communicate that consistently at the unit level. A franchisee who enforces value message clarity in local marketing is applying the same principle Chili's applied systemwide.
Digital mix investment starts with making digital ordering the path of least resistance — not with building a loyalty program. The Wingstop lesson applies at 3 units as much as at 3,000. Make digital easy. Capture the data. The program can come later.
---
The national -0.3% traffic figure masks significant regional variation that operators and investors in specific markets need to understand separately.
Black Box Intelligence's monthly reporting consistently showed California, Texas, and the Western region as the weakest-performing geographies throughout 2025 — with traffic declines concentrated in zip codes with larger Hispanic and lower-income consumer populations. Those same markets are heavily indexed for QSR consumption. A brand running system-level averages may be masking deep regional underperformance in its highest-density markets.
The Midwest, New England, and Mid-Atlantic consistently outperformed the national average in 2025. For franchise buyers evaluating territory selection, the regional traffic divergence matters more than system-level same-store sales comps — which average the winners and losers together.
A full breakdown of regional traffic trends and what they mean for location-level due diligence is covered in our regional traffic data analysis.
---
The Black Box Intelligence GM retention data covers full-service restaurants primarily. Whether the same 3.5pp sales correlation holds for QSR specifically — where GM responsibilities and unit volumes differ — is not confirmed in their public reporting. The directional finding is applicable. The exact magnitude may differ across segments.
The Wingstop digital mix data documents a correlation between digital penetration and database growth. It does not prove causation for the specific unit economics outcomes that would result from comparable digital investment at different brands. Wingstop's category position — wings as a delivery-native, flavor-driven product — may make digital ordering more natural for its customer than for a burger chain or breakfast concept.
The Del Taco outcome reflects multiple variables — brand positioning, competitive environment, operational execution, macroeconomic conditions in California — not solely the absence of digital investment. Drawing a direct causal line from digital underinvestment to the $460 million value destruction overstates what the data shows.
The Starbucks Q1 FY2026 recovery is one quarter. It is early evidence, not a confirmed turnaround. The loyalty program restructuring Niccol referenced has not yet been executed.
We do not know how the discount dependency cycle resolves if economic conditions deteriorate further in 2026. Circana's historical data suggests traffic does not recover until consumer sentiment improves and deal-seeking normalizes. The timeline for that normalization is not predictable from the data available.
McDonald's, Taco Bell, Wingstop, Chili's, Jack in the Box, Del Taco, Dutch Bros, CAVA, Starbucks, and all other brands referenced in this article were not contacted for comment prior to publication. All data is sourced from publicly available earnings calls, investor materials, and industry research.
---
In 2025, the QSR industry ran the most aggressive promotional environment since the Great Recession. Deal-seeking traffic hit a 50-year high. Margins compressed. Del Taco sold for less than a fifth of what its parent company paid four years earlier.
And yet some brands grew traffic, protected margins, and entered 2026 with structural advantages their competitors cannot replicate quickly.
The difference was not which brands ran better promotions. It was which brands built operational systems — GM retention programs, digital ordering infrastructure, value message discipline, unit economics standards — before the promotional environment demanded they compromise them.
Wingstop proved the central point. A brand with 60 million users, 72% digital mix, and a loyalty program not yet launched is not a technology story. It is an operations story. Every transaction captured, every customer profiled, every repeat visit earned without a discount represents an operational decision made years before the 2025 traffic environment required it.
Starbucks proved the corollary. A brand with 34 million loyalty members and declining traffic is not a loyalty story. It is an operations story. Traffic recovered when operations improved — not when the loyalty program was restructured.
Traffic declines in QSR are not a demand problem.
They are an operations problem.
The brands that figure that out before the next downturn will have a very different 2029 than the ones still running promotions and wondering why the traffic doesn't stick.
---
---
QSR Research Hub is an independent publication. We use publicly available data, industry reporting, and direct source attribution. All earnings call quotations are verbatim from published transcripts. Black Box Intelligence and Circana data is cited from their original published research. When we don't know something, we say so. This article is analysis, not investment or franchise advice. Verify all financial claims in current FDDs and consult qualified advisors before making franchise or investment decisions.
1. Black Box Intelligence. "Restaurant Industry in Review: Trends from August 2025." August 2025. https://blackboxintelligence.com/blog/restaurant-industry-in-review-trends-from-august-2025/ | Black Box Intelligence. "September 2025 Restaurant Industry Trends." https://blackboxintelligence.com/blog/restaurant-industry-in-review-trends-from-september-2025/ | Black Box Intelligence. "State of Restaurant Workforce: Employee Turnover." October 2025. https://blackboxintelligence.com/blog/state-of-the-restaurant-workforce-employee-turnover/
2. Nation's Restaurant News / Circana. "Restaurant customers are seeking deals at the highest rate in 50 years." October 2, 2025. https://www.nrn.com/quick-service/restaurant-customers-are-seeking-deals-at-the-highest-rate-in-50-years | Circana. Global Foodservice Traffic 2025 Report. March 12, 2026. https://www.circana.com/post/circana-reports-global-foodservice-traffic-grew-in-2025-despite-economic-headwinds
3. Taco Bell Corp. / Yum! Brands. "TACO BELL UNVEILS BOLD BUSINESS STRATEGY FOR A RELENTLESSLY INNOVATIVE FUTURE." March 4, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/taco-bell-unveils-bold-business-strategy-for-relentlessly-innovative-future-302390727.html | Restaurant Business. "Taco Bell is apparently starting 2025 on fire." March 4, 2025. https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/taco-bell-apparently-starting-2025-fire
4. Nation's Restaurant News. "Wingstop to develop company's first digital loyalty program." November 5, 2025. https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/wingstop-to-develop-company-s-first-digital-loyalty-program | QSR Magazine. "Wingstop's Digital Evolution Hits New Milestone with Loyalty Program Launch." May 1, 2025. https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/wingstops-digital-evolution-hits-new-milestone-with-loyalty-program-launch/ | QSR Magazine. "After Rare Sales Decline, Wingstop Targets AI Kitchens, Loyalty, and Marketing." February 2026. https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/after-rare-sales-decline-wingstop-targets-ai-kitchens-loyalty-and-marketing-to-reignite-growth/
5. Restaurant Dive. "Restaurant winners and losers in 2025." January 12, 2026. https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/restaurant-2025-winners-losers-taco-bell-pizza-hut-chilis-jack-in-the-box/808808/ | CNBC. "McDonald's, Chili's, Taco Bell lean into value meals in 2025." December 28, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/28/value-meals-restaurants-mcdonalds-chilis-taco-bell.html
6. Bank of America State of Restaurant Industry 2025. | Nation's Restaurant News / Circana. "Loyalty traffic doubled in past 5 years." June 12, 2025. https://www.nrn.com/restaurant-loyalty/loyalty-traffic-doubled-in-past-5-years-and-is-more-than-a-third-of-restaurant-visits-study-finds
7. Partech 2025 QSR Operational Index. | Restaurant Dive. "Q4 2025's restaurant winners and losers." March 2026. https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/restaurant-q4-2025-winners-losers-mcdonalds-starbucks-pizza-hut-papa-johns/814719/
8. Circana, LLC. "Circana Finds Restaurant Loyalty Members Visit 20 Brands Annually, Same as Nonmembers." June 12, 2025. https://www.circana.com/post/circana-finds-restaurant-loyalty-members-visit-20-brands-annually-same-as-nonmembers
9. Jack in the Box Inc. / Business Wire. "Jack in the Box to Acquire Del Taco." December 6, 2021. https://investors.jackinthebox.com/news/news-details/2021/Jack-in-the-Box-to-Acquire-Del-Taco/ | Restaurant Dive. "Jack in the Box sells Del Taco to Yadav for $115M." October 16, 2025. https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/jack-in-the-box-sells-del-taco-115-million-yadav/802951/ | Jack in the Box Q4 2025 Earnings Transcript. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2025/11/20/jack-in-the-box-jack-q4-2025-earnings-transcript/
10. CAVA Group. "CAVA Brings Status Matching to the Table as an Industry First." Business Wire, October 9, 2025. https://investor.cava.com/news/news-details/2025/CAVA-Brings-Status-Matching-to-the-Table-as-an-Industry-First/ | CX Dive. "Cava has big plans for its loyalty program." May 19, 2025. https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/cava-loyalty-hospitality-cx-push/748521/ | NRN. "CAVA adds tiers to its loyalty program." October 9, 2025. https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/cava-adds-tiers-to-its-loyalty-program
11. Marketing Week. "Starbucks claims broad appeal driving customer connection." January 28, 2026. https://www.marketingweek.com/starbucks-infrequent-customers-appeal/ | CNBC. "Starbucks investor day updates: Brian Niccol speaks on turnaround." January 29, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/starbucks-investor-day-updates-brian-niccol-turnaround.html | Marketing Dive. "Starbucks CEO cites marketing as a bright spot of turnaround efforts." July 30, 2025. https://www.marketingdive.com/news/starbucks-ceo-cites-marketing-as-a-bright-spot-of-turnaround-efforts/756272/
12. McDonald's Corporation. Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings Release. PRNewswire, February 11, 2026. https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/investors.html