Food services and drinking places
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in preparing meals, snacks and beverages, to customer order, for immediate consumption on and off the premises. This subsector does not include food service activities that occur within establishments such as hotels, civic and social associations, amusement and recreation parks, and theatres. However, leased food-service locations in facilities such as hotels, shopping malls, airports and department stores are included. The industry groups within this subsector reflect the level and type of service provided. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 73,143
- Under 10 employeesA
- 47%
- Establishments · USA
- 700,469
- Employment · USA
- 11,999,728
- Payroll · USA
- $284.7B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 73,143 Canadian establishments with employees, 47% have fewer than ten — weighted toward mid-sized establishments.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 722, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Easy to open and hard to keep open: food, labour and rent leave single-digit margins, delivery platforms take a further cut, and failure rates are high. Franchises trade margin for a tested format.
- Who sets the price
- The operator, against every other meal within reach.
- The software it runs on
- Restaurant point of sale, online ordering, delivery integration, scheduling and inventory — sold with payments attached.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
The appeal is the low entry cost relative to a restaurant, and that is also the ceiling: a truck or a catering kitchen sells a fixed number of covers on a fixed number of days, and the good days are seasonal and weather-dependent. Commissary requirements and municipal vending rules limit where and when service is legal. Revenue scales by adding units, each of which needs its own operator — which is a staffing problem, not a growth engine.
Per-capita alcohol consumption is not a mood, it is a measured series, and it is falling faster than the fixed costs of a room. Statistics Canada records 6.8 litres of absolute alcohol sold per person aged 15 and over in 2024/2025, down from 8.3 in 2020/2021 and 8.0 in 2013/2014, and the dollar value of alcohol sales fell in nominal terms for a second straight year while every input price rose. Beer — the volume a pub actually turns — is down from 76.1 litres a head to 53.6 over the same period. The rent, the licence and the staff on a slow Tuesday do not decline with the trend line. Late-night licensing, liability and staffing make this the least forgiving hospitality format, and this is the rare screen where the demand curve can be read off an agency table rather than argued. The structure compounds it: 1,423 of 2,708 Canadian establishments employ fewer than ten people and 13 employ a hundred or more, so there is no scale operator to sell to and no franchise system carrying the format. An entrant buys a fixed cost base and rents a shrinking occasion.
A fit-out runs several hundred thousand dollars before a single cover, net margins in the single digits leave no room for a slow first year, and the delivery platforms take a cut large enough to invert the economics of the orders they bring. Included in this research deliberately: it is the most-considered entry in this list and the one where the arithmetic is least forgiving. The software sold to these operators is studied separately at the same code.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 27
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toast POSNYSE:TOST | Full-service restaurants722511 | $6.2B | 1/21 |
| Boston Pizza InternationalPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | $976M | 2/21 |
| PARNYSE:PAR | Full-service restaurants722511 | $456M | 3/21 |
| Cash AppPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 4/21 |
| OnarollPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 5/21 |
| Recipe UnlimitedTSX:RECP | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 6/21 |
| Restaurant365Private | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 7/21 |
| TripleseatPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 8/21 |
| AramarkNYSE:ARMK | Special food services7223 | — | 1/3 |
| CompassNYSE:COMP | Special food services7223 | — | 2/3 |
| DeliverectPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 9/21 |
| Delivery platformsPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 10/21 |
| DriposPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 11/21 |
| Lightspeed RestaurantPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 12/21 |
| Lunchbox TechnologiesPrivate | Full-service restaurants722511 | — | 13/21 |
And 12 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Accommodation and food services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
3 rows sit directly beneath 722, and 14 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7223 | Special food services | 4,122 | Catering & Mobile Food Services |
| 7224 | Drinking places (alcoholic beverages) | 2,708 | Drinking Places (Bars & Pubs) |
| 7225 | Full-service restaurants and limited-service eating places | 66,313 | Independent Restaurant OperationRestaurant Operations Software |
Alongside it, under 72 Accommodation and food services
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 721 | Accommodation services | 10,666 | Hotel Property Management SystemsSmall Motel & Roadside Accommodation AcquisitionShort-Term Rental Management Software+3 more |