(Natural News)—At least 10 major restaurant chains have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year due to rising costs, shrinking consumer spending and the disappearance of pandemic-era financial support.
In August alone, three notable restaurant chains sought bankruptcy protections. Mediterranean fast-casual chain Roti filed on Aug. 23, citing challenges from high operating costs and decreasing foot traffic in downtown areas. Earlier that month, Buca di Beppo and World of Beer also turned to Chapter 11 to restructure their businesses amid rising labor costs and inflationary pressures.
In June, Rubio’s, a fast-casual chain known for its fish tacos, filed for bankruptcy protection, citing the burdens of higher labor costs and dwindling lunchtime crowds due to the popularity of hybrid and remote work patterns cutting into sales. Melt Bar & Grilled, a Cleveland-based grilled cheese chain, also sought Chapter 11 protection after its restaurant count shrank to just four locations. Kuma Holdings, the parent company of burger chain Kuma’s Corner, also filed for bankruptcy protection that same month.
In May, Red Lobster, once a seafood giant, also filed for bankruptcy protection, citing its struggles with high leasing costs, increased competition and poor strategic decisions, like its ill-fated “endless shrimp” promo for $20 that cost the company millions. (Related: BANKRUPTCY BOOM: U.S. saw 70 major bankruptcies in just 4 months, the third worst start of year since 2000.)
In April, Tijuana Flats, a fast-casual Tex-Mex chain, also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the time, the Tijuana Flats also announced new ownership under Flatheads LLC and the closure of 11 restaurants as part of its restructuring. Sticky’s Finger Joint, a chicken-tender chain, also declared bankruptcy that same month due to rising costs, lingering effects from the pandemic and legal issues from a trademark dispute with rival Sticky Fingers.
In February, Boxer Ramen, a Portland-based ramen chain, filed for bankruptcy and closed all four of its location by late April after more than a decade in business.
More restaurants and food chains are expected to follow before 2024 ends.
Bankruptcies nearly double in 2024 due to broader economic challenges
According to Jonathan Carson, co-CEO of bankruptcy services and technology firm Stretto, major restaurant companies have been filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to rising labor costs, inflation and shifting consumer behavior. He explained that although these numbers remain lower than the peak of the pandemic, when nearly three dozen major franchises went bankrupt, the current economic environment is still presenting a unique set of challenges.
“In this situation, a challenging economic environment, post-pandemic recovery issues, rising labor costs, changing consumer habits and inflation have caused more restaurants to struggle in 2024,” Carson said in an interview with Fox Business, noting those issues have also impacted other sectors of the economy.
Carson also stated that the shift in consumer spending is a growing concern. With more consumers burdened by student loan debt, mortgage debt and credit card debt, spending patterns have changed. “The numbers are staggering and rising, and high interest rates don’t help when it comes to the health of the consumer,” Carson said. “The consumer is in a rough spot.”
Industry experts expect this trend to continue, with more restaurant chains likely to file for bankruptcy as they navigate an increasingly volatile market.
Watch this video about food conglomerates going bankrupt.
This video is from Thisisjohnwilliams channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- 127 Pizza Hut branches to close down as franchisee files for bankruptcy.
- Bankruptcy filings in U.S. surge at fastest pace since 2009 as Bidenflation continues to ravage Americans, businesses.
- Big Lots reportedly faces possible bankruptcy amid plummeting stock prices.
- Major U.S. flooring supplier files for BANKRUPTCY and plans to close 94 stores nationwide.
- Discount homeware chain Big Lots warns of BANKRUPTCY filing, triggering fears of mass closures.
Sources include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
