With the foodservice industry starting to return to pre-pandemic levels, it’s clear the landscape continues to shift, evolve and transform.
Many of those changes fuelled by the pandemic are evident in our annual Top 100 Report, which for more than 50 years has become the barometer of growth in the foodservice and hospitality industry. Like the industry it charts, COVID also fuelled substantive changes on our report, forcing us to make the difficult decision not to produce it in 2020 when companies were dealing with the devastation of restaurant closures. In 2021, we produced a truncated version of the report by downsizing it to the Top 50 in 2021 and 2022. Because the sales of so many companies had been significantly impacted by the pandemic, many operators chose not to release data they previously provided to us annually, while others were swallowed up by larger entities through mergers and acquisitions and, as part of these new structures, chose not to release data that had previously been shared with us.
This year, we’ve scaled back up to produce the Top 75, inching closer to our regular Top 100 — hopefully by next year. That’s an indicator that business is slowly returning to normal — whatever normal is these days. Certainly, that’s not to say that challenges have magically disappeared — far from it. Labour shortages, price increases and tech transformation continue to impact this industry in ways never before imagined.
And several companies have continued to not release sales data, forcing us to provide estimates where needed. While this report features more estimates than pre-pandemic, we felt it was important to include as many companies as possible to ensure an accurate representation of this industry given their significance to the foodservice and hospitality landscape.
On another note, it gives us great pleasure to also present our Top 30-under-30 award winners in this issue. Since KML acquired this important recognition program from the OHI in 2019, we’ve expanded it to make it national. We’ve increased the number of adjudication members to be more representative of the industry and the country and we’ve returned to hosting the awards program as a live event, away from the virtual presentation we hosted during the pandemic. Not only is the event once again live, but we’ve built an entire day-long Leadership Summit around it themed “Future Forward.” The event will be showcased on June 13th at the Sheraton Centre Toronto and it’s truly transformative in that it is intergenerational — bringing current leaders together with tomorrow’s leaders to dialogue on the most important and pressing issues of the day. We hope you can share the day with us and we look forward to making this an annual event.
