These growth-boosting strategies can help restaurant businesses outperform during a uniquely challenging moment.

When customers stockpiled groceries and stayed at home during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurant businesses suffered. Stoves went cold and chairs were stowed atop tables.

Restaurant insolvency rates skyrocketed globally, and many countries in Europe maintained restrictions on restaurants for more than a year. The pandemic reshaped the industry with a once-in-a-century disruption.

The pressure facing restaurants has yet to abate, as the sector brims with new channels and new cost pressures. Supply chain woes, rising rents, labor market imbalances (the doubling of wage rate growth is often the number-one challenge cited by restaurants), and soaring inflation (at its highest rate since the 1970s) are all altering restaurant economics.

Meanwhile, consumer attitudes are in flux, and a digital revolution is changing the way business is done.

On delivery apps, small but quick-moving brands are now routinely outperforming larger, more entrenched players—despite being a fraction of the size offline. Virtual brands can be instantly conjured nationwide, hitting peak sales velocities within a few months of their launch. New loyalty programs are attracting more members in one year than their predecessors managed to accumulate over the course of a decade. The heat keeps turning up.

This uniquely challenging environment represents an opportunity: restaurant companies that seize this open-ended moment to innovate and grow can set themselves apart for years to come. Our research tells us—across the board—that making bold, strategic decisions during times of uncertainty can be a winning play.

In this article, we demonstrate how important profitable growth is for restaurants, and then detail the eight ingredients that comprise a recipe for extraordinary growth. How restaurant companies balance these eight ingredients, and how quickly they mobilize around an integrated growth agenda, could determine their future trajectories.

Profitable growth is the main dish

Generating growth within the consumer sector is never easy. But McKinsey research has shown that growth—especially profitable growth—is imperative for meeting the high expectations of consumer sector investors. Profitable growth is, and will remain, the North Star.

Achieving long-term growth outperformance is elusive for chain restaurant companies. McKinsey analysis of same-store sales growth among a representative sample of 55 chain restaurant brands finds that only 18 were able to outperform the average of their peers for the majority of the ten-year period from 2012 to 2021.

Only eight of those brands—or 15 percent—managed to outperform the average of their peers in at least nine of those ten years. And only one brand beat the average of its peers’ same-store growth every year during that time frame.

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This article is a collaborative effort by Will Almquist, David Fuller, Gizem Günday, Jen Henry, and Gage Wells, representing views from McKinsey’s Retail Practice.