AI Analysis: Monthly survey of food services and drinking places

Executive Summary

Statistics 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 dramatic features are the catastrophic COVID-19 revenue collapse in early 2020 and the subsequent record-breaking recovery, with August 2025 setting an all-time high of $9.30B. Significant variability exists across regions and industry segments, with receipts ranging from $124 to over $9.3 billion thousand dollars.

Key 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.
• The dataset covers 5 NAICS industry categories across 14 geographies (10 provinces, 3 territories, and a Canada-wide total), comprising 158 unique data series tracked in both unadjusted and seasonally adjusted forms.
• Post-COVID recovery in 2020–2021 produced unusually large positive month-over-month swings exceeding ±20%, among the most extreme short-term volatility observed in the entire 336-month record.