Drinking Places (Bars & Pubs)
The industry — Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)
Base industry report for 7224 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 2,708
- Under 10 employeesA
- 53%
- Establishments · USA
- 40,258
- Employment · USA
- 401,424
- Payroll · USA
- $10.0B
Of 2,708 Canadian establishments with employees, 53% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Take share rather than ride the market. Demand is flat, seasonal or policy-driven, so growth has to come out of a competitor. That is possible and it is slower, and it rewards an operator who can wait.
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.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — growth quality
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 bar draws from walking distance and a short taxi ride, and its hours are set by a municipal licence. Sized by covers per night in one room.
Statistics Canada size bands: 833 of 2,708 establishments sit in the 5–9 employee band and 1,423 fall below ten. Counting, not estimating. It is the plainest statement that this industry has no scale tier.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| The independent single-room majorityA | not disclosed | — | 1,423 of 2,708 Canadian establishments employ fewer than ten people; no revenue is published for any of them. This is the competitive structure, not a gap in it. |
| Boston Pizza InternationalTSX: BPF.UN (Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund)A | $976M | — | 2025 franchise system sales across the 372 restaurants in the Fund's royalty pool |
| SIR Corp (Jack Astor's) / Recipe Unlimited (State & Main, Original Joe's) / Northland Properties (Moxies, Shark Club)C | not disclosed | — | Bar-and-grill banners competing for the same occasion. Privately held or not separately disclosed; not researched for this record. |
| Provincial liquor retail and the at-home occasionB | not disclosed | — | The substitute, not a rival room. Statistics Canada's sales table covers liquor authorities and other retail outlets and does not separate on-premise from off-premise, so the split between the two was not measured here. |
Evidence
Evidence. The demand series on this record IS sourced. Absolute alcohol and beer volumes per person aged 15 and over, and the dollar value of sales, were read in Statistics Canada table 10-10-0010-01 (Sales of alcoholic beverages types by liquor authorities and other retail outlets), fiscal years to 2024/2025 [A]; per-capita figures use the population aged 15+, as the table's own note specifies, for OECD and WHO comparability. The table's note also says it replaces tables 10-10-0029 and 10-10-0034 from reference year 2013/14, so no comparison here spans that break. What the table does not do is separate on-premise from off-premise sales — it measures what liquor authorities and retail outlets sold, so it sizes the occasion, not the bar's share of it. The earlier claim that the decline is concentrated in younger cohorts was NOT sourced and has been removed. Boston Pizza's franchise sales and royalty-pool restaurant count were read in the Fund's 2025 annual results release [A]; Boston Pizza is a bar-and-grill franchise, not a pub, and is on the record as the nearest disclosing format, not as a proxy for one. Establishment counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US County Business Patterns (2022) [A]. No revenue, margin or failure-rate series for Canadian drinking places was found. The cut itself remains analyst judgment: UNVERIFIED.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National foodservice association (restaurants, bars, caterers); site says 'thousands of members' without a figure. Runs the RC Show in Toronto.
'Over 5,000 members, representing more than 11,000 establishments', per its homepage; largest provincial hospitality association.
Advocate for BC's private liquor sector: liquor-primary pubs and bars, private liquor stores and cannabis retailers. No member count on site.
Restaurants Canada's annual foodservice and hospitality trade show, Toronto; 2027 edition page live at check. No attendance figure stated.
Working bartenders' forum; RSS feed returned current posts at check.
Bar and pub owner-operators' forum; RSS feed returned current posts at check.
Annual Las Vegas bar-industry show; next 22-24 Mar 2027 per search results. Site blocked automated access.
Quebec holds most Canadian bars but its bodies were not verifiable: the Union des tenanciers de bars du Quebec site (utbq.ca) shows nothing dated after 2020, and the Corporation des proprietaires de bars, brasseries et tavernes du Quebec has only a Facebook page. Bar & Restaurant magazine (barandrestaurant.com) blocks automated access.