Impact and Aftermath of COVID-19 in the Food and Restaurant Sector 

The pace at which the food & beverage sector was growing was superb. Almost every offline store had an online presence for food delivery to people, apart from a strong focus on ambience at their physical spaces too.

A pandemic that’s inexplicably huge. A once in a generation occurrence, that has brought the world to its knees. COVID-19, or the coronavirus, as we are calling it, has rendered even the most developed economies powerless. Each and every sector of almost every country has been severely affected, but the quickest impact perhaps, has been on the food and restaurant sector.

In the initial stages only, many governments had ordered closing down the restaurants and bars to contain the spread of this virus. However, the impact was just not confined to restaurants only, but a number of other related areas like liquor, wine, and food production, shipping and farming.

The pace at which the food & beverage sector was growing was superb. Almost every offline store had an online presence for food delivery to people, apart from a strong focus on ambience at their physical spaces too.

While a major chunk of these restaurants had a food delivery app of their own, more and more of them relied on delivery onboarding partners like Zomato and Swiggy to get their food reach out to more people.

A New Shape of The Food Sector Post COVID-19

Before the world got hit by the COVID-19 outbreak, cities were getting clogged with more and more cafes, restaurants, and bars lining up, with the people not being able to fully keep up with what they actually wanted to try.

As far as the present situation is concerned, there has been a gradual lift of lockdown in quite a few countries. Despite that, restaurants will still not be seeing people in their premises for a long time ahead, till things get perfectly controlled.

While it might be too soon to make a guess about what’s going to happen ahead, what is certain is that there will be a lot of changes in customer preferences and behavior when it is about restaurants and food.

Here are some of those trends which can be in store for restaurants in a post coronavirus world-

•     Stringent Health And Safety Measures

For restaurants of most of the countries, the biggest takeaway from this coronavirus pandemic is to pay a lot more attention to sanitation and health. Restaurants and cafes will adopt a number of regulations by which both, the diners as well as the food preparation staff follow complete hygiene practices.

Online only restaurants, also known as cloud kitchens too, will have their hands full in maintaining the safety of their customers and staff. Restaurants will focus more on getting a top-notch food ordering app solution, so that customers get the most delicious dishes from restaurants right in their homes, without the need to come down to the dining place.

•     More Emphasis on Lesser Wastage

When the food industry does become operational to full capacity again, it will be pretty important to either let go of the older practices or introduce newer practices that can be clubbed with more creativity to boost and recover the sector quickly. More and more restaurants are bound to make online deliveries a major part of their operations, either with third party players or get their own on-demand food delivery apps created for the same purpose.

The more aggressive ones will go for both the options to maximize revenue and recover from the losses during lockdown more quickly.

Moreover, there will be compact menus and limited dishes on offer to reduce food wastage of any kind, and menus might be rotational on a weekly basis or for some other duration that restaurants may be comfortable with.

•     Domestic Raw Materials & Encouraging Vegetarian Food

When the outbreak subsides, there will be an increased preference for local produce, and more conscious efforts to prefer vegetarian food. Ingredients like turmeric, citric fruits, ginger, and garlic will find more presence in the daily diet of people. Moreover, other than the low costs of domestic produce, hot foods will find more takers in comparison to cold food as well.

World headlines have been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic for almost four months now, no kind of business has been left safe. Recovery will take time, but recovery will definitely be there.