This is the one of the top three biggest opportunities for increased profit RIGHT NOW
Something has changed.
It’s gripping the USA right now, has been tearing through Australian supermarkets in the second half 2025, and has hit the streets of Australian and New Zealand dining.
There is a change in why people go out to eat.
For a long time, the deal was simple: you go out to escape, to be looked after, to eat things that would be indulgent at home.
All kinds of special occasion wrapped under one bow; the venue was the vendor, the accomplice and we, the guest surrendered. That was hospitality.
But that deal is breaking down - not for everyone, and not all at once, but in a way that is structurally significant, and gaining momentum. This is more than a trend.
For the better part of three decades, the hospitality industry operated on a clean psychological contract with its guests: you come here to escape. You surrender control.
You eat things you wouldn't cook at home. You drink more than you planned. You leave feeling pleasantly worse than when you arrived. That was the deal. That was the value exchange.
And it worked - until the customer's identity started to change around it.
In 2026, a significant and growing segment of your customer base does not want to escape. They want to perform.
Customers wear devices that measure their recovery, their strain, their sleep quality. They have a supplement stack. They are not eating out to switch off - they are eating out to stay “on”. And the question they are silently asking every time they open your menu is not "what do I feel like?" but "what does this say about me?" What will this “cost” me?
That is the question your menu is almost certainly failing to answer.
The Sociology of the Seat
To understand what has happened, you need to understand what wellness has become. It is no longer a health category. It has become a status category - perhaps the defining status category of the current time.
The Rolex told people you had money. The Whoop strap* tells people you have discipline. These are not health choices. They are identity signals. And identity signals, by definition, are not abandoned at the restaurant door.
When a customer who self-identifies as a high-performer sits in your dining room, they are not simply hungry. They are in the middle of a continuous project of self-construction.
Everything they consume - food, content, experience - is evaluated against the question: does this make me more or less like the person I am trying to become?
A menu that offers "indulgent," "rich," "comfort-driven" food as its primary identity signal is answering that question wrong. It is positioning the dining experience as a deviation from the customer's self-image rather than an expression of it.
And deviations, however enjoyable in the moment, create a specific kind of post-experience regret that erodes loyalty faster than almost anything else in hospitality.
The customer does not blame you. They blame themselves. But the next time they are deciding where to eat, they will choose the venue that does not ask them to choose between pleasure and identity.
They are built around flavour, comfort, and occasion - a vocabulary that assumes a guest motivated by pleasure and willing to suspend discipline for a few hours. That guest still exists. But they are no longer the only guest.
And the gap between what your menu offers and what your identity-driven diners are searching for is a revenue gap.
Here is what that gap looks like in practice:
Dessert skip rates are growing, at their highest on record. Not because your desserts are bad. Because your dessert menu asks them to choose between pleasure and identity - and that’s a game pleasure rarely wins. Every skipped dessert is a high-margin course lost, an opportunity for a sale gone begging.
Average cover values are eroding. Guests are eating more carefully, substituting more, sharing more, ordering fewer courses. Appetites are suppressed, budgets are tightening, and menus are not catering for this growing need.
Your floor team may be fluent in flavour and failing at function. The server who can describe every dish's provenance and preparation but cannot explain its satiety, recovery value, or protein profile is systematically underserving the fastest-growing guest segment in dining.
The mechanism driving all of this is identity economics.
The shift required is architectural, not culinary. It starts with how you describe your food - not just what it contains, but what it does. It continues with how your floor team is trained - not just to sell, but to position.
And it is anchored in the understanding that your menu is, whether you designed it that way or not, making a statement about who eats here. The question is whether that statement matches who your best customers are trying to be.
Every menu has a positioning. Most operators do not choose that positioning deliberately - it accretes over time through dish selection, language, photography, and the cumulative weight of historical best-sellers. But the positioning exists whether it was designed or not.
A "vice-only" positioning - one that signals indulgence, escapism, and permission to abandon discipline - is not inherently wrong. There are customers for whom that is exactly what they want.
But it is increasingly a shrinking market, and it is specifically shrinking among the customers who are most valuable: high-frequency, high-spend, identity-conscious diners who eat out not occasionally but as part of a deliberate lifestyle. It is a market that is most price sensetive, and most likely to substitute their dining experience with something else.
There is a pricing mechanism at work here that is new to dining, but has been part of retail forever.
When a customer purchases something that reinforces their self-image as a high-performer, they are no longer making a food decision. They are making an identity investment.
And identity investments operate under completely different price elasticity rules than ordinary consumption. Premium and luxury retail brands don’t do cost plus pricing - they enjoy an enormous dividend their brand has earned. And customers pay a lot more for it.
Consider the math: a customer who self-identifies as health-conscious will readily pay a significant premium - 30% or more - for a product that validates that self-image over an objectively superior product that does not.
This is not irrational. It is the logic of identity economics.
The meal that makes you feel like the best version of yourself, that validates you and aligns with your aspiration is worth more than the meal that merely tastes better.
This is why wellness businesses are recession-resistant in a way that conventional hospitality is not. During economic contractions, people cut discretionary spending - the things they do for pure pleasure. But they protect identity spending - the things that define who they are.
A customer will cancel a restaurant reservation before they cancel their Whoop subscription, because the Whoop is not a luxury. It is part of their identity infrastructure.
The venues that embrace this are not selling just food. They are selling a position in the customer's identity. They are selling the version of dinner that makes the customer feel coherent - like their pre-prepared lunch, their training, their supplement stack, and their social choices are all pointing in the same direction.
That coherence has a price.
The practical implication of all of this is not that you need to remove your best-selling pasta or apologise for your dessert menu.
A menu that describes dishes purely in terms of flavour and comfort - "rich," "indulgent," "slow-cooked to perfection" - is speaking to one type of customer. A menu that also surfaces biological value - recovery, satiety, focus, energy balance - is speaking to a fundamentally different one.
This is what menu layout as an identity map means in practice. It is not about adding a wellness section or labelling your salads with calorie counts. It is about understanding that your guests are arriving with an internal framework for evaluating what they eat - and designing your presentation to meet them inside that framework rather than asking them to abandon it.
The operators who are capturing the identity-driven segment are not necessarily serving different food. Smart menu design entails items that bridge both escape eating and aspirational eating. They are serving the same food with a different story - one that positions eating well and eating at their venue as a single coherent act rather than a tension to be managed.
If your venue does not make your customer feel like a better version of themselves, you are functioning as a calorie-dispenser. Calorie-dispensers are being systematically replaced - by delivery platforms, by meal kit subscriptions, by GLP-1 medications that remove the appetite for the type of eating your menu was designed around.
The operators who will grow through this structural shift are not the ones who pivot to "health food."
They are the ones who understand that the dining experience now includes identity - and venues that include in their design, from menu architecture to service language to environment, making the customer feel that eating here is consistent with the highest version of who they are, can simply charge more for the food and beverages.
That is the identity dividend. Your venue can increase the margin on these dishes by 25%-35%
And right now, most operators are leaving it entirely on the table.
Names You Should Know
Meet Hedone: The Ancient Pompeii Tavern Keeper, & OG of “Dynamic Pricing”
Before Hedone wine was just wine. The strategy? Pour it and hope they pay. Hedone realized that not all wine (or all customers) are created equal.
Hedone stepped in and changed the game. She utilised tiered pricing for wine (cheap for the masses, pricey for the elite). Established early revenue management principles before "yield" was even a word. Optimised inventory by matching quality to willingness to pay.
She was the first Revenue Manager. The punchline?
She proved that even in 79 AD people would pay a premium for "reserve" juice.
Hedone, Pompeii Tavern Keeper 79 AD
QUOTES FROM THE PASS
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication in cooking.
Until next time,
For more tips and deeper dives into hospitality success, follow me on LinkedIn or subscribe to the rethink newsletter. Subscribe
