Spring 2024 State of Business Dining Report: Catering Edition

Our State of Business Dining Report, created in partnership with Technomic Inc, provides restaurants and corporate travel managers a semiannual review of business dining benchmarks and data. What you’ll learn in our most recent report:

• How business dining has recovered post-pandemic and the outlook for 2024
• A deep dive into the business catering boom:
  • Corporate catering trends from 2019-2023, segmented by market and sector
  • Business catering types featuring business diner personas and testimonials
  • Analysis of catering trends in the pharmaceutical sector
• Comparisons between enterprise and small business dining
• Where the growth potential for restaurants lies

Business vs Consumer Dining

Our BDIndex in combination with Technomic’s consumer dining measurement shows how business dining fared against the general industry.

Business dining spend appears to have reached a new normal, with a BDIndex reaching 103 in Q3 of 2023. Ultimately the BDIndex settled at 98 by the end of 2023.

Technomic’s consumer spend index rose to 116 in 2023. Restaurant operators are feeling optimistic, with 30% expecting consumer traffic to increase over the next 3 months.

Top Trend: Business Catering Opens Up Opportunities

Dinova’s proprietary corporate cardholder dining spend data reinforces the upward trajectory for corporate catering and reveals deeper insights that could inform restaurants’ strategies in 2024.

In this latest report, find the most up-to-date information on catering, a boom that is marked by “return to office” trends, meeting and events recovery, and relationship building.

Methodology

In order to offer statistically significant sales insights for the State of Business Dining, we analyzed the following data:  

• Companies that participated in the Dinova program from 2019-2023.
• Sales data from the top 1,500 US restaurant brands. Top restaurant brands may change for individual reports, but indexes are updated so that all the historical data represents the current list of the top 1,500 brands. 
• More than 5 years of pre-pandemic business dining sales data to inform annual patterns. 

About Dinova

Dinova makes business meals count. We operate a business dining program that includes a network of 23,000+ restaurants and more than 550 corporations, government agencies, and small to medium sized businesses in the US and Canada.

We are the only total business dining solution that delivers spend visibility, savings and an employee rewards program for companies while also providing a B2B strategy that drives growth for restaurants.

Complete our contact form to learn more about joining our business dining program.

About Technomic

Technomic Inc., a Winsight company, was founded as a management consulting firm in 1966. Since then, Technomic’s services have grown to encompass cloud-based B2B research tools, consumer and menu trend tracking and other leading strategic research and analytic capabilities, to prioritize and size business opportunities.