Name: Monthly survey of food services and drinking places
Creator: Statistics Canada
License: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

Monthly survey of food services and drinking places — AI AnalysisStatistics Canada's Monthly Survey of Food Services and Drinking Places (Table 21100019) tracks 27 years of monthly data across 14 regions and 5 industry categories, revealing a 226.3% growth in seasonally adjusted receipts from ~$2.6B in January 1998 to ~$8.6B in December 2025. The dataset's most dKey Findings

Canadian food services receipts grew 226.3% over the full 27-year period, rising from approximately $2.6B (seasonally adjusted) in January 1998 to $8.6B in December 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020) caused the most severe anomaly in the dataset's history, triggering a near-total revenue collapse that stands out sharply against 22 years of prior baseline data.

Record-high receipts were recorded in mid-2025, with August 2025 ($9.30B), July 2025 ($9.19B), and June 2025 ($9.04B) identified as the dataset's top 3 statistical outliers by Z-score.

Receipts data is heavily right-skewed across 24,683 records, with a mean of $454,377 thousand far exceeding the median of $73,604 thousand, reflecting extreme variation across regions, service types, and time periods.

Location counts are similarly right-skewed, with a mean of 5,375 establishments versus a median of just 1,064, ranging from 2 to 80,657 locations across the dataset.

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