2017 NRN Top 100 PDF

The Top 100 is a primer for how restaurant chains and companies stack up when you look at the cold, hard numbers. Use this report as a guide to compare chains’ and companies’ U.S. performance based on systemwide sales, unit counts, franchisee growth, market share and estimated sales per unit.

One takeaway from this year’s report is that the definition of foodservice continues to morph every day. As some restaurant segments struggle — like Casual Dining and Family Dining — the C-Store segment continues to grow its share of the foodservice pie with 6.2 percent sales growth in the Latest Year. The C-Store segment still represents a small percentage of the overall total Top 100 sales, but smart operators will make sure to keep an eye on this rising competition. Another interesting finding was that several of the big growers on the list were not newer concepts. Longtime industry heavyweights showed that it’s possible to grow a large legacy business in a significant way.

With its strict methodology, the Top 200 ranking, now in its 44th year, has long been an industry standard for foodservice business measurement. The backbone of these reports is NRN’s data expert Alan J. Liddle, who has been compiling and managing the database and providing analysis for 25 years. These reports benefit from his deep industry knowledge accumulated over his 33-year tenure at Nation’s Restaurant News.