Restaurants that fail to balance risk and innovation are losing customers, study finds

Nearly nine in 10 said balancing risk and innovation was their biggest challenge.

Restaurant leaders are struggling to reconcile innovation with risk management, and the gap is costing many of them customers, according to research commissioned by Mastercard.

The study, "The experimentation advantage: Research on de-risking innovation," was carried out by Forrester Consulting in 2025 and examined innovation, risk management and AI adoption across several industries. Amongst restaurant leaders surveyed, 86% said balancing risk and innovation was a challenge, and 37% said that failing to strike that balance contributed to customer churn.

For operators in the quick-service sector, where diners have more choice than ever, the findings point to a competitive cost. More than half of restaurant leaders, 51%, said misalignment between risk management and innovation had cost them their competitive edge.

Competition itself is the most commonly cited barrier to moving faster. 56% of restaurant leaders named growing competition or market disruption as a top business concern and an obstacle to rapid innovation. According to the study, market pressure can push companies into a reactive, risk-averse position that stifles new ideas rather than encouraging them.

Seven in 10 restaurant leaders said refining new concepts before scaling them was a challenge, a higher rate than in industries such as retail and financial services.

Internal alignment and measurement emerged as further sticking points. Whilst 72% of restaurant leaders said stakeholder alignment was critical or important to innovation, 53% said it was difficult to achieve.

Two-thirds, 67%, said measuring return on investment was their top challenge when acting on innovation priorities. The study noted that when teams cannot demonstrate impact, they struggle to secure the buy-in needed to expand initiatives, even those showing early promise.

AI adoption reflects the same tension. Although the study identified widespread use of AI across the industry, including in demand forecasting, personalised offers, labour planning, menu optimisation and inventory management, 42% of restaurant leaders said it played only a limited role in their strategy, often because of uncertainty about future outcomes.

The research points to structured experimentation as a way to close the gap. 83% of restaurant leaders said small-scale testing gave them the insights needed to move forward, and 44% said advanced data and analytics helped increase revenue from existing offerings without adding risk. Across all industries surveyed, 72% of leaders reported large or transformational gains when they turned insights into action.

The study used pricing as one example. Rather than changing prices everywhere at once, a chain can test adjustments in a subset of locations and compare results against matched control sites to isolate the true impact.

Adjusted pricing might lift margins in one region while reducing sales of entry-level items in another, the study said, giving leaders evidence to refine their approach.

The stakes for getting it wrong are considerable. Restaurant leaders reported that almost half of their ideas did not break even or prove their initial hypotheses.