Dive Brief:
- Jersey Mike’s ended Chick-fil-A’s 11-year run as the top-rated major fast food brand according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index study of restaurant consumer attitudes.
- The sandwich chain achieved a satisfaction score of 84 on a scale of 0-100, compared to Chick-fil-A’s 83, which was unchanged from 2025, ACSI found.
- Overall, customer satisfaction with major restaurant brands remained remarkably stable year-to-year, with QSRs posting an average score of 79 — the same average as last year — despite the challenging macro-economy and consumer price sensitivity, ACSI said.
Dive Insight:
The 2026 ACSI report was the first one to include Jersey Mike’s, which has grown dramatically in the last several years and is reportedly eyeing a public market debut.
Chick-fil-A remained the second place brand, and also the segment leader in QSR chicken, with KFC, Raising Cane’s, Wingstop and Popeyes notching scores of 80, 79, 77 and 73, respectively. KFC’s score increase — 4% year-over-year — was tied with Subway for the second largest gain in customer satisfaction. This increase reflects Yum Brands’ multi-year effort to bring successful strategies from Taco Bell to the chicken chain.
Popeyes was the loser in the chicken sector, with a three-point drop. Several quarters of sales trouble have pushed the Restaurant Brands International subsidiary to re-emphasize reliability, operations and its core menu under its new president Peter Purdue. Such an effort will likely take time to manifest in national satisfaction scores.
Another RBI chain, the once-troubled Burger King, has climbed the rankings since the beginning of its Reclaim the Flame turnaround campaign several years ago, and now shares the top spot in burger QSR satisfaction with Culver’s with 78 points. Reclaim the Flame has helped Burger King return to sales growth, revive many of its stores and improve its products.
Industrywide performance indicators remained remarkably steady between 2025 and 2026, with customer scores for staff helpfulness, food quality and app reliability unchanged. Other key categories saw slight increases, including order accuracy, which rose from 85 to 87 points, and speed of checkout, which rose from 83 to 84 points. The only major industry KPI to see a decline, as measured by ACSI, was mobile app quality, which dropped from 85 to 84.
The persistence of these scores show the resilience of restaurant operations to macroeconomic uncertainty, and indicates that consumers are looking beyond price points when evaluating restaurants.
“Consistency across the full experience is what separates the leaders right now, and that’s showing up clearly in the data,” said Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI. “The challenge going forward is sustaining that as costs continue to rise and competition intensifies from outside the traditional restaurant space.”
Restaurant sales on the whole grew below the rate of menu price inflation in 2025-2026, “marking the slowest growth outside the pandemic since the Great Recession. Growth is now largely driven by higher prices rather than increased customer traffic, leaving real demand under pressure,” a press release outlining the report’s findings stated.
