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In the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most famous chain restaurants—Horn & Hardart, Howard Johnson’s, A&W Root Beer, Bob’s Big Boy, Dairy Queen, White Castle, and Marriott Hot Shoppes among them—appeared in urban areas as walk-up lunch rooms, cafeterias, and hamburger stands. The earliest of these chains focused on urban working populations. However, as suburban expansion and leisure road travel began to increase around midcentury, most chains altered their designs to accommodate parking and drive-in services. New chains appeared specifically to lure automobile-based customers. And as chains moved into suburban settings, the notion of eating out for fun rather than as a worktime concession gained traction, fully exploiting the potential for increased sales that could come from turning eating out into entertainment.

The expansion in the 1950s of chains—spurred by the franchise model developed by Howard Johnson in the 1930s and used so successfully by McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s, Long John Silver’s, Burger King, and Sonic, among others—established the familiar national landscape of easy-access, low-cost, quickly served, and predictable food. The franchise model was a variation on the earlier centralized chain system that solved the problem of effective central management across widely dispersed locations. Individual owners were licensed to operate local restaurants using the chain’s common building design, food, and delivery theme under contracts that specified quality and consistency.

The network of restaurants across the United States grew slowly into the 1960s, from 127,000 restaurants in 1954 to 135,000 in 1967, and then rapidly increased by more than 100 percent by the mid-1980s. Fast-food restaurants accounted for 40 percent of U.S. restau¬rants by 1983, and Americans ate out an average of 3-4 times a week, spending 40 percent of their food budgets on eating out. Breakfast food chains like IHOP, Perkins, Waffle House, and Dunkin’ Donuts began to proliferate in the 1960s, first serving commuters and shift workers traveling to and from work but, like other chain restaurants, quickly adding families and teenagers in search of leisure activities. The addition of breakfast sandwiches at traditional lunch fast-food chains like Hardee’s and McDonald’s in the 1980s and at coffee chains like Starbucks in the 1990s added breakfast to the list of meals regularly eaten out.

While restaurants are the largest source of food away from home (FAFH), Americans can purchase foods at sporting events, recreational places, hotels and motels, and schools and colleges, as well as from retail stores and vending machines. These outlets are similar to food service counterparts in terms of the foods being offered and their nutritional composition. However, food service at these outlets is a secondary activity that could reflect either a demand for food itself or a demand for eating as a complement to the primary activity, or both. Besides restaurants, the only other sector whose share of the total FAFH rose during the 1987-2017 period was recreational places (which include movie theaters, sports, and other entertainment venues), going from 2.1 percent of the nominal FAFH in 1987 to 3.6 percent in 2017. The expenditures for the other types of FAFH—hotels and motels, schools and colleges, retail stores, and vending machines—declined as a share of FAFH between 1987 and 2017.