Today we’re releasing the second edition of Yelp’s Local Economic Outlook, a program to rank U.S. metro areas by the pace of growth in their local-business population. This program is part of a larger, ongoing project surfacing insights from Yelp’s deep data stores to help businesses succeed and to arm policymakers with the information they need to make effective change that can boost local economies.

The State of Restaurants in America

In an effort to look more closely at the health of the restaurant industry across the country, we’ve also analyzed review ratings, an indicator of consumer sentiment, for chain and independent restaurants in the 50 metro areas included in the Outlook.

What we’ve uncovered points to a shift in consumer perception of restaurants. Apparently fueled by celebrity chef-owner obsession in popular media and increased consumer confidence in non-chain restaurants because of review platforms like Yelp, there has been a tremendous rise in independent restaurants over the last five years.

Fast-food chain restaurants have seen a notable decrease in average ratings over the last five years, by about one-third of a star, on a scale of 1 to 5 stars — equivalent to a loss of about 16 percent of their average rating. Similarly, fast-casual chain restaurants have experienced a decline in ratings, by about one-tenth of a rating point on average between 2012 and 2017.

While chain restaurants across the country encounter increasingly choosy diners, independent fast-food and fast-casual restaurants have seen a continued increase in average ratings, improving by 7 percent in the last five years. Ratings for casual-dining chain restaurants held up better, unchanged on average, though they lagged behind their independent competitors, which gained a quarter of a rating point between 2012 and 2017.

“Historically, chain growth has outpaced the broader restaurant industry growth, but in the past three years we’ve actually seen independents and smaller operators outperform chains,” said Dave Henkes, Senior Principal at food industry research firm, Technomic. “It’s clear that consumers are voting with their dollars and are rewarding those restaurants that provide a resonating point of difference in the overall experience.”