My good friend, Michael McDougall, at EDF Man Capital Markets in NY, sent me a nice titbit last week Wednesday about the U.S. fast food industry.
He noted that "there are over 200,000 fast food stores in the U.S. and the industry employees over 4 million people, adding 200,000 in 2015 alone. Hamburger chains dominate with a 30 percent market share, pizza 15 percent, sandwich shops 12 percent, chicken 8 percent and Mexican food 7 percent" and the rest are unspecified food joints.
This prompted me to look at the South African picture, so I did a quick search and came across an interesting report by Insight Survey which spells out the current market dynamics of the South African fast-food industry.
It's evident from the report that South Africans love their chicken. The chicken was flying high, accounting for more than a third of the total fast food market, followed by burgers, pizza... and fish reeling in at fourth place.
In 2016, there were 1,504 chicken joints. Trailing behind by just a handful of stores, burgers were also amongst the country's fast food favourites with 1,493 outlets. The pizza was third on the list with 999 stores. Fish is perhaps not a favourite of many, with just 376 fast food joints. The remaining 410 were unspecified joints.
I should have warned you that reading this article might give you ideas of approaching one of these delectable fast food joints. Unfortunately, I won't be joining you today, I packed a sandwich to work.
This post originally appeared on Sihlobo's blog, Agricultural Economics Today.
