If you think travel at US$1.33 trillion is a huge industry, well think again – food is three times that.
Louise Daley, deputy CEO, Accor Asia Pacific, in opening the eyes of the audience attending the recent Tern Travel Careers to the career opportunities available in the food sector, said the global restaurant market was valued at US$3.8 trillion in 2019, up from US$2.7 trillion in 2014, and growing at 7% a year.
In her presentation, “Food Glorious Food: The World of Dining”, Daley spoke about how dining had evolved from survival to a social exercise.
“It is now about socialisation and you having a social activity when you dine. It is also about you socialising with the people who are not even there – how you influence them, how you encourage them and even how you make money.”
This social movement has made the industry one of the biggest commercial generators in the world – “it’s an enormous industry with lots of job opportunities”, from food bloggers and influencers to food tech and restaurant reservations.
“Today careers in this sector are not what you see in the front but what happens in the back – almost every role in the industry is present in F&B. There’s logistics, there’s financing, there’s food preparation, there’s growing food products, there’s food handling, there’s marketing, there’s digital, there’s structural – you name it, everything you possibly want is in F&B and dining.”
Daley also shared the wide scope of the industry. There are 8,700 active food tech startups with US$8 billion invested in last two years. The most funded sub-sectors are delivery, smart kitchen appliances, on-demand, POS, recipe box, plant-based, e-commerce, office-focused, table booking and pre-ordered ready-to-heat meals.
In total the food Industry was worth US$2.7 trillion in 2014, rising to 3.8 trillion this year, 27 times the size of ridesharing at US$100 billion (hotel is US$864 billion, aviation US$709 billion).
The dining sector is also highly digitalised as today’s always-on travellers have the propensity to book restaurants in holiday with 72% of connected travellers using smartphones to look for restaurants while on vacation. There are an estimated 4,100 restaurants listed in travel search website TripAdvisor, four times the number of hotels and accommodation.
She told the audience of students and job seekers that to many, a career in F&B and dining is what they may see or jobs your friends have such as chefs, bar tenders, waiters, waitresses. “This is just the tip of the iceberg, it may be what you see and can be a fantastic entry point into a world and career in F&B,” said Daley.
