How COVID Reshaped Restaurant Financing — And What Owners Still Need Today

In 2020, the National Restaurant Association called it the most difficult year the industry had ever faced. Dining rooms closed, revenue collapsed overnight, and owners who'd built their businesses around foot traffic had to reinvent how they operated in a matter of weeks.

Five years later, it's worth looking back at what actually stuck. Three shifts that started as survival tactics never reverted once restrictions lifted — they became how the industry runs. Each one still comes with a financing question attached, and that's really what this is about: not what changed, but what it costs to keep up with it.

1. Digital Ordering Went From Backup Plan to Main Revenue Channel

The numbers make the shift hard to miss. Full-service restaurants have seen digital orders climb 237% since 2020, and quick-service chains now generate roughly three-quarters of their sales through online and phone orders. Across the industry as a whole, online ordering has grown about three times faster than dine-in since 2014 and now accounts for close to 40% of total restaurant sales.

That's not a "trend to watch" anymore — it's infrastructure. A restaurant opening today is expected to launch with a working ordering app, a POS system that talks to delivery platforms, and often some form of self-service or kiosk ordering already built in, not bolted on later once the concept proves out.

For owners, that means the capital question moved earlier. It's no longer "should we invest in tech eventually" — it's part of the opening budget, alongside kitchen equipment and buildout. For existing operators retrofitting an older setup, that's exactly the kind of need Jumpstart Marketplace℠ was built to route to the right funding source, since it falls outside a standard acquisition or startup loan.

2. Ownership Changed Hands — And Kept Changing

The pandemic also kicked off a wave of restaurant ownership turnover that's still playing out. 2025 was one of the more active years on record for restaurant M&A: private equity firms took meaningful stakes in growth concepts, and several well-known chains went private.

One of the more interesting shifts is who's doing the buying. Multi-unit franchisees — the operators who understand a concept's unit economics better than almost anyone — are increasingly the ones acquiring the franchisor itself, rather than staying on the operating side.

That pattern, operators who know a business from the inside deciding to buy in rather than stay a step removed, is exactly the kind of acquisition Jumpstart Finance was built to fund.

3. Health-Conscious, Transparent Menus Became the Baseline

Demand for healthier, more transparently sourced food didn't fade once the pandemic did, either — industry analysts still trace today's wellness-driven consumer expectations back to that period. Plant-based options, GMO-free ingredients, and clearer sourcing aren't much of a differentiator anymore in most markets; they're closer to table stakes.

That shift usually shows up as a working-capital problem before it shows up on the menu: new supplier relationships, ingredient cost changes, and sometimes kitchen retrofits to support a different prep process.

Financing a Restaurant Business Today

None of this changes what Jumpstart Finance has spent 30+ years doing: helping business owners fund the moment they're actually in, not the moment the industry used to be in. Whether that's capital to bring ordering technology in-house, financing to acquire a restaurant or franchise, or working capital to shift a menu and supply chain, submit your deal and let's talk about what fits.