5 Top Restaurant Trends for 2024

To wrap up BentoBox’s 2023 Restaurant Trend Report, our team wrote up a handful of predictions we expect to see in the new year.

Restaurants will advertise as great places to work.

The era of employee empowerment will continue in 2024, with more restaurants promoting themselves as worker-friendly both to potential employees and to diners. Look for non-compensation benefits like health insurance and paid time off to become more common — and to appear on menus and websites.

You’ll see some out-of-the-box brand collabs.

Chefs becoming influencers? Old news. The next frontier is restaurants themselves partnering with lifestyle brands. 2023 saw an explosion in fashion x food collaborations, with restaurant logos popping up on shoes, handbags, etc. At some point in 2024, you’ll let out your biggest “huh.” yet.

AI will drive up the value of owning diner data.

As of ChatGPT’s arrival in December 2022, every busy restaurant owner got a (free) tool that could help them launch the email marketing campaign they’d been putting off. Many businesses will leverage this; the smart ones will realize how valuable this makes the ability to own diner data.

Read More: The Restaurant’s Guide to Generative AI

Restaurants will reclaim their social media presence.

Influencers historically played a big role in the way restaurants have met the needs of social media. Now that restaurants boast far-reaching brands themselves, look for restaurants to make and manage their own accounts instead of relying on outside content.

You will be served by a robot.

The long-anticipated automation revolution in kitchens has, for better or worse, taken longer than expected. But recent advances in machine learning, coupled with a hard-won maturity among food tech investors, makes 2024 the year you first see something truly groundbreaking on this front.