Blog

Globally, lockdowns limiting people’s movements, coupled with a genuine fear of contracting COVID-19, have delivered a brutal blow to the hospitality industry. In Sub-Saharan Africa the lockdown rules in some countries have spanned from bans on the sale of alcohol in addition to strict curfews, intensifying the financial predicament for restaurants in particular. 

Borderless Access has done extensive research into the meal-buying habits of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically South Africa and Nigeria. Here we examine data on people’s buying habits, whether short-term or permanent, with regard to visiting restaurants, ordering takeaways, opting for drive-through choices, ordering meal kits to be cooked at home, buying ready-made meals from grocery stores, or choosing to only cook at home.

As Covid-19 has turned the world on its head, few industries have been as shaken up as that of restaurants and hospitality. Worldwide, restaurants and eating establishments have taken a beating as lockdown has resulted in closures, changes and restrictions to what used to be a burgeoning industry.

Borderless Access conducted research to understand eating out and ordering-in habits and how these have been shaped – both temporarily and permanently – by the ongoing global pandemic. Unsurprisingly, ordering in has been by far the most utilized activity in recent times… ordering food for delivery, ordering take-aways from a restaurant and ordering/ collecting food from a fast-food chain have been the top activities globally in the past 3 months, and both of these have been particularly well-utilized in both the UAE and Saudi.

There are very few industries that have been adversely impacted by the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns as severely as the restaurant sector. According to the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), 7 million direct employees of the restaurant industry have been hit by the pandemic and the industry body had approached the government of India for a bailout package to help sustain them through the worst phase of the pandemic. The situation is similar in other parts of the world, as people’s habits regarding eating out has changed since the pandemic.