TL;DR
Restaurant sales varied last quarter, with a 5.8% increase at Burger King. Some chains like Dutch Bros, Starbucks, and Texas Roadhouse had strong results, while others had poor performances.
What are we to make of the recent set of restaurant earnings?
This week’s episode of the Restaurant Business podcast The Week in Restaurants looks at the most recent set of earnings reports and what they say about the state of the business.
There were some strong results at chains like Dutch Bros, Starbucks, Burger King, Texas Roadhouse and others. But there were also some poor performances. And in some cases the brands had relatively easy comparisons.
We also talk about Sweetgreen, and whether wraps can fix its sales problems.
On this week’s Technomic segment, Robert Byrne discusses consumer research on Burger King, which just reported a 5.8% same-store sales increase in the first quarter.
And on Tech Check, Joe Guszkowski talks about loyalty.
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Restaurant Business Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Maze is a longtime industry journalist who writes about restaurant finance, mergers and acquisitions and the economy, with a particular focus on quick-service restaurants.
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In this story
This story was originally published in Restaurant Business on May 8, 2026. Burnaze summarizes and links to the original reporting.
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