Italian restaurants with table service are growing much faster than average in the world

"A position of strength," emphasises Tommaso Nastasi, senior partner and strategy and value creation leader at Deloitte, "that has direct implications for the entire food supply chain. If almost one fifth of the world's table-service restaurants offer Italian cuisine, every dish served abroad is a potential driver of demand for pasta, oil, cheese, cured meats and wines. The challenge is to transform this visibility into a system: coordinating production, distribution and catering to preside over international markets in a structured rather than fragmented manner'.

On a more general level, considering all types of out-of-home consumption, the world average growth stops at +2.2%, but Europe accelerates with +6% compared to the previous year. For the coming years, projections indicate North America and Asia-Pacific as the areas of strongest expansion, driven by the quick service restaurant and street food models.

On the domestic market, Deloitte points to strong fragmentation -family management is still dominant - but chains are gaining ground: their share has risen from 8% in 2019 to 11% today (much lower than in the rest of the world where they are over a third of the total). This is also positive news for Italian food companies

"Partnerships with structured insignia allow suppliers not only to streamline commercial efforts and optimise the cost of service," says Nastasi, "but also to engage in co-development initiatives, offering more customised propositions and ultimately generating more value across the ecosystem. In practice, working with a chain allows suppliers to better plan volumes, logistics and product development.

Operationally, the growth of out-of-home is redesigning not only menus, but the architecture of venues themselves: 41% of operators are redesigning spaces to integrate delivery and takeaway management. 74% are introducing automation technologies. And packaging has established itself as an independent commercial lever: 53% of consumers, according to Deloitte, are willing to pay a premium for quality packaging.

The Restworld Observatory - a platform specialising in recruiting for the catering industry - analysed 4,919 job positions in the sector with declared payroll, published between April 2024 and March 2026. It emerged that the average equivalent net salary is 1,731 euros per month over twelve months, with an annual growth of 3%, one percentage point above the increases envisaged by the Ccnl Turismo e Pubblici Esercizi (National Collective Labour Agreement for Tourism and Public Establishments). The North-South gap turns out to be smaller than expected: 82 euros per month, or 4.7%. Ten per cent of the positions exceed 2,250 euro net per month, and the top profiles - kitchen managers in starred hotels and restaurants - reach salaries of between 63,000 and 69,000 euro gross per year.

The Observatory's data is part of the long-running debate on the difficulty in finding employees for the sector: according to the recent Fipe 2026 Catering Report (on 2025 data): employees have fallen to just over one million, a drop of 10.3% in one year, or 114,338 jobs lost. One in two job searches are problematic and it takes an average of five months to find a cook. The vacancy rate in the restaurant industry is 4.8% (Istat), almost double the Eurozone average of 2.5% (Eurostat).