Coffee sales help doughnut shops outpace QSR traffic growth
Doughnut shops may see a lot of business, but it’s really the coffee that drives their sales, according to new data from The NPD Group, a Chicago-based research firm. The category is sizable with 18,080 doughnut shops. Within QSR, doughnut shops tallied 2.1B servings of coffee, while customers ordered 805M servings of doughnuts, according to NPD market research. This data spans a 12-month trailing period ending October 2019.
What’s more, only 15 percent of QSR doughnut purchases include a coffee and doughnut combo. Also, a total of 68 percent of doughnut shop purchases include coffee while only 30 percent include doughnuts. Thanks to the more finicky, servings of specialty coffee, including lattes and frozen coffee, are up. NPD reports specialty coffee servings were up 14 percent from the prior year, while regular coffee servings were down 4 percent.
Relatively speaking, doughnut shops did well attracting traffic. The 3.2B in total annual visits represent a 2 percent increase from last year. Meanwhile, total QSR increased traffic by only 1 percent during the same period, and the restaurant industry as a whole was flat vs. last year.
Photo credit: Linda Sondergaard
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