Full-Service Restaurants in Switzerland

2020 IMPACT

Quarantine lockdown, social distancing and reluctance to socialise take their toll

Full-service restaurants faced a bleak year during 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic and the official response to it had a very negative impact on the entire channel. The most important factor to take into consideration is the impact of the quarantine lockdown that was imposed upon the population of Switzerland for several weeks from the middle of March and which required all consumer foodservice outlets to close for on-trade service.

Spike in domestic tourism benefits outlets in rural locations as urban outlets suffer

Full-service restaurants located in densely populated urban areas were hit harder than their counterparts in rural locations by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020. Indeed, full-service restaurants located in rural areas of the country, including the fairly remote and mountainous areas that tend to attract significant numbers of tourists, benefited from the inability of local people to travel abroad during the year due to the closure of Switzerland’s borders of the virtual shutdown of the international travel and tourism industry in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Traditional comfort food affairs the best as consumers avoid experimenting

Among the various categories of full- service restaurants present in Switzerland, the big winners during 2020 tended to be those that serve traditional comfort food such as burgers, fried food and pizza. These have long been among the most popular consumer foodservice options among Swiss consumers and as the opportunities to dine out and socialise outside of the home diminished considerably over the course of 2020, consumers became increasingly averse to experimentation, sticking instead to the types of comfort foods that they are already familiar with.

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