Limited-Service Restaurants Closing Gap With Full-Service Establishments in Rural United States

Food-away-from-home spending and consumption have been on the rise in the United States for nearly 10 years, accounting for more than 50 percent of total food spending as of 2019 and nearly 25 percent of calories consumed as of 2017–18. The number of food-away-from-home establishments also has been rising to meet shifts in consumer demand. For the rural U.S. food-away-from-home landscape, economists from the USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) and the University of Arkansas recently documented three decades of changes using proprietary data from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) database and the ERS Rural-Urban Continuum Codes.