When Danny Meyer, founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, announced on Oct. 14 that his 13 full-service restaurants would phase out tipping and raise menu prices, he took gratuities off the table but served up a heaping bowl of discussion. “I’m not waging a campaign on behalf of our entire industry. I’m doing what I think is right for our company,” Meyer told Nation’s Restaurant News. “What we’re trying to do is to address a system that is broken and that is not sustainable,” he added.

Even before Meyer’s announcement, Joe’s Crab Shack, the casual-dining seafood division of Houston-based Ignite Restaurant Group, was testing a no-tipping policy, which it expanded in October to 18 of its 131 restaurants.

While initial public offerings slowed in 2015, the public markets still took a sizable bite into the restaurant industry this year, starting with New York City-based Shake Shack Inc.’s public debut in January, which raised $105 million for the burger chain. The stock leapt to $50 a share in early trading, an increase of nearly 140 percent, and for a time put a value on the then-63-unit Shake Shack at nearly $1.8 billion, or more than $28 million per location.

Three other restaurant companies — Fogo de Chao Inc., Wingstop Inc. and Bojangles’ Inc. — also debuted on Wall Street.

With the death of its founder and the prison sentencing of its longtime spokesman, Subway — the world’s largest restaurant chain in terms of unit count — suffered a turbulent and challenging year. Former pitchman Jared Fogle, who became a spokesman for Subway in 2000 after a weight loss credited to eating at the sandwich chain, pleaded guilty to child pornography and sex charges. He was sentenced in November to 15 years and eight months in prison.

That came just two months after the Sept. 15 leukemia-related death of Fred DeLuca, 67, who had founded the franchise in 1965 and oversaw its growth to more than 44,000 locations worldwide. On top of those events, the NRN Top 100 noted that Subway’s estimated domestic unit volumes had fallen in each of the past two years.

The restaurant industry’s recruiting and retention challenges intensified throughout the year as the nation’s unemployment rate dipped to 5.1 percent. The People Report Workforce Index for the fourth quarter saw its highest level for recruiting difficulty since it was created in 2006, with 64 percent of its participating companies planning to hire more hourly workers.

To attract and keep the harder-to-find workers, companies like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Starbucks Corp. were beefing up their benefits packages for hourlies. Chipotle announced in June that it was expanding benefits formerly reserved for salaried workers — including tuition reimbursements, sick pay and paid vacations — to all employees on July 1. Starbucks in November announced it would offer tuition-free education benefits to spouses and children of employees who were currently in the U.S. Armed Forces or veterans.

Organizers of the Fight for $15 movement intensified pressure on local and state governments to raise minimum wages above the $7.25 an hour federal level. On Nov. 10, the group led protests in more than 270 cities and targeted the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee. The protests came before and after the Sept. 10 approval by New York State’s labor commissioner for minimum wage of $15 an hour as soon as 2018 for larger quick-service restaurant chains, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposing a $15 minimum statewide wage for all industries, which will have to get past the state’s legislature.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s Corp. — the target of many of the Fight for $15 protests — in April said it would raise wages and benefits for both part-time and full-time workers at company-owned restaurants to $1 more than locally mandated minimum wage starting in July. The company also said wages of all workers, up to the restaurant manager position, will increase based on tenure and job performance.

This was the year restaurant companies were to get into the delivery business. From Chipotle’s announcement in April that it was offering delivery in 67 cities with the Postmates app to Taco Bell’s regional offering in July that launched delivery with DoorDash, restaurants were tapping into the growing number of third-party services, which included online giant Amazon.

Digital innovations were sprinkled across the industry as restaurant companies sought to remain competitive, both in terms of customer needs and company efforts to more effectively manage labor.

Starbucks was leading the charge, having invested for several years in new technology. In October, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said mobile payments accounted for 21 percent of Starbucks transactions, and mobile ordering and payment accounted for about 5 million transactions in that month alone.

Ron Shaich, chairman and CEO of Panera Bread Co. said consumers wanted to engage with brands on digital platforms. “We’re now running a major technology organization here, nearing hundreds of thousands of orders a day,” Shaich said.

Innovations from casual-dining mobile wait lists to mobile-app ordering were bubbling up throughout the restaurant space.

McDonald’s long the stalwart performer among quick-service restaurant brands, faced increasing difficulties through 2015. In a major executive shuffle, Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s branding chief, was named in January as CEO and president to replace Don Thompson, who retired in March after 25 years with the company.

In April, McDonald’s said it was closing 350 underperforming stores around the world— 220 in the United States and China and 130 in Japan — as it continued to see negative same-store sales and traffic in major markets.

The burger chain had a number of initiatives under way, and franchisees agreed in mid-November to a new “McPick 2 for $2” value platform to debut in January.

More restaurant brands were opening their eyes to providing the once-morning-only meal all day long. The breakfast behemoth lumbering onto the landscape was McDonald’s Corp., which decided to offer Egg McMuffins and other breakfast items all day as of Oct. 6. But Nomura analyst Mark Kalinowski found the addition of breakfast items after 10:30 a.m. was getting mixed reviews from some of McDonald’s franchisees.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Golden Corral offered all-day breakfast for a limited time and accompanied it with an ad campaign featuring comedian Jeff Foxworthy.

A survey by the National Restaurant Association found that seven in 10 respondents wanted restaurants to serve breakfast items throughout the day, and that percentage skewed higher with younger consumers.

The nation’s largest broadline food distributor Sysco Corp. on June 29 terminated its proposed merger with second-largest distributor US Foods Inc. 18 months after the $8.2 billion plan to combine the nation’s two largest distributors rocked the foodservice industry. The two companies walked away from the deal after a federal judge agreed to an injunction in a government lawsuit to block the merger.

Sysco said the deal’s termination cost the company $693 million for its 2014 fiscal year. “We ended up pulling the trigger on the US Foods deal, and that cost a lot of capital,” Sysco CEO Bill DeLaney said.