COVID-19 and foodservice trends

Aug 02, 2022

“Restrictions and social distancing during the last few waves of COVID-19 have significantly affected the foodservice sector,” says Jeewani Fernando, provincial consumer market analyst with Alberta Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Economic Development. “While the past couple of years have been very challenging to the foodservice industry, it has also brought about many opportunities, positive changes and challenged the foodservice industry to look at things differently. Understanding key trends across foodservice segments may help industry participants to fine-tune their business strategies and plan their recovery.”

The pandemic affected thousands of foodservice manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, restaurants and bars and employees. In April 2020, foodservice sales plummeted to their lowest levels in more than 2 decades and sales have been very volatile since then.

Major easing of restrictions and other measures in mid-2021 helped to increase sales close to pre-pandemic levels. However, as of January 2022, sales remained below pre-pandemic levels in Canada as well as in Alberta.

“Many restaurant operators introduced changes to survive their foodservice operation during the pandemic. They focused heavily on cost cutting which included changing hours of operations, streamlining menus and reducing other operating expenses.”

Many owners launched new takeout and delivery options, promoted themselves on social media and implemented online ordering through restaurant websites and apps. Some unconventional changes included the introduction of meal kits, and offering grocery items at foodservice establishments such as meat, dairy, produce, bread, pasta and sauce.

“New concepts, new technologies, new ways of doing business and new consumer behaviours all result in a foodservice landscape that looks very different than it did in 2019,” says Fernando. “This evolution is not over yet, and the market will continue to shift. This will create new opportunities for some companies, return the old opportunities for others, and challenge still others to change things up entirely.”

Source : Alberta.ca

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids