TrendSource Trending Blog

For our last market research blog of 2020, we decided to review the year by looking through a guilty-pleasure lens, so to speak. This means looking at the year’s blogs that dealt with alcohol, junk food, and even CBD. It was a tough year, we all did what we had to do to get through it. See you in 2020. 

Well at least it’s almost over, amiright? 2020, what a mess. It  always had a new way to hurt us, only ever briefly pausing the pain to give us some good news (looking at you, MBJ), and felt gratuitously endless. You really do not need market research to tell you that 2020 was horrific, but through it all, we’ve been there with you, chronicling market research and the world that shapes it every week in this humble blog. 

DoorDash went public this week, smashing its expected market value on the heels of its first profitable quarter. The company currently owns nearly half of the US third-party delivery market, up from their one-third share only a year earlier. According to DoorDash, they claimed just 17% of US market share in 2018, but have steadily increased this to their current ~50%, which is twice that of its largest competitor, UberEats. 

McDonald’s is finally giving into the meatless moment, announcing their plan to slowly roll out a vegan patty, the McPlant, over the course of 2021. For industry watchers, this is not unexpected--vegan options have gone from niche to mainstream and several of McDonald’s biggest competitors have already added Beyond and Impossible patties to their menus.

Casual dining has been in some trouble for a while now--let’s recall that even before March of this year, the segment was getting t-boned, undercut in cost and value proposition by fast casual, and rendered generic and dated by upstart independent eateries. They were stuck in the middle, in every sense of the phrase--between generations, economic classes, and the urban/rural divide, fast casual was built for everybody but seemed to be appealing to relatively few.