Study sheds light on who eats at fast-food, fast-casual restaurants

There’s a familiar narrative when we talk about what the rise of fast-casual dining has meant to the restaurant industry. Newcomers such as Chipotle, Panera Bread and Shake Shack have stormed the market with a promise of more upscale ingredients and nicer ambiance than one typically gets at fast-food restaurants, and that has made for turbulent times for old-school players.

There’s no doubt that the fast-casual category is, indeed, booming. These restaurants saw a whopping 11.4 percent increase in sales last year, according to industry research firm Technomic. That easily beats the 3.4 percent growth at full-service establishments, as well as the 4.4 percent increase seen at fast-food chains.

However, a new analysis of restaurant visitation patterns suggests that the dynamics in the dining industry are somewhat more nuanced than many stories suggest. Location-based marketing company xAd used its technology to analyze 30 million visits to 12 of the largest quick-service restaurants between January and March.

Researchers examined just how much customer overlap there was. They found that Chipotle had its highest overlap with Panera. It also shared more customers with Starbucks and Chick-fil-A than it did with Taco Bell.

Meanwhile, Taco Bell had a strong correlation with KFC diners. That may, in part, reflect that the sister chains are often located geographically close together, sometimes in the same building.

But overall, with the exception of some customer overlap between Taco Bell and Chipotle, fast-food restaurants and fast-casual restaurants are essentially siloed.

Here’s why that is important: Now that consumers have adjusted to this new restaurant landscape, it’s worth noting that they tend to stay exclusively in one dining lane.

So if Taco Bell, for example, were to slip in sales, it seems more likely that those dollars are being lost to another fast-food player — not Chipotle. And as Chipotle aims to pull out of its sales spiral, it might try to win over the people getting lunch at Panera.