Introduction

From the average Joe to the biggest fitness nut, each and every one of us has set foot into a fast food restaurant at least once in our lifetime. We all know these brands, we see them everywhere but which brand is the most popular here in Belgium? 

Accurat is a leader in consumer behaviour insights, and near real-time evolutions. We did an analysis of the Belgian fast food market in 2024 and we found some surprising results. In this analysis we focused on visit metrics of the most popular burger and pizza restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Quick, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, but also KFC. Beyond that, we looked at popular days and hours to eat at a fast food restaurant, and we analysed how long people stay in each restaurant.

Visit Share

Visit share is one of our most important metrics as it's our equivalent of market share. It’s a measure for the percentage of visits that a brand pulls compared to its competitors and a great indicator for brand equity, brand popularity and market dynamics.

Unsurprisingly, McDonald's has the highest visit share of the Belgian fast food market with an average of 40% this year. McDonald’s is followed closely by Burger King & Quick, both under the umbrella of Burger Brands with a total of 39% average visit share. These two giants go toe to toe and nearly make up 80% of the visits and the difference between them is nearly negligible. The rest of the visit share is for Domino’s Pizza Pizza Hut, and KFC.

Visits share per restaurant

McDonald’s has the highest visit share in the Belgian fast food market, but also recorded the highest number of burger restaurants (117) at the time of writing. However, Burger Brands actually has more restaurants combining Quick & Burger King for a total of 135 restaurants. The biggest pizza chain is Domino’s Pizza with over 125 restaurants.

In terms of visits per restaurant, McDonald’s remains the most popular fast food chain in the market with a visit share per restaurant of 24%. This is still a lot better than Quick and Burger King, trailing with 21% and 20% respectively. Domino’s actually has a very low visit share per restaurant as their business model relies on a lot of locations, and focuses on deliveries. In comparison, its competitor Pizza Hut draws almost double the amount of visitors per restaurant. Overall, burger restaurants remain far more popular than alternatives offered by competing chains. McDonald’s remains dominant in both absolute visits and visits per restaurant.

What’s the busiest hour in the fast food industry?

Saturday is the most popular day in general, followed by Sunday and Friday. The most popular hours of the week are between 6 and 8pm on Saturday. These are the peak hours for any day of the week. However, we see that on Fridays and Saturdays a lot of the traffic comes in later in the evening whereas on Sunday, we see more evenly spread traffic throughout the day. 

Mondays and Tuesdays are by far the least popular days to visit a fast food restaurant, with visits picking up as the week progresses. The most popular lunch moment in fast food is on Wednesday between 12-13, which can be explained by the fact that schools close around this time.

Measuring the ‘fast’ in fast food: How long is the average visit?

To answer this question, we measured the dwell times of each chain. This is the average duration of a visit to the chain. What we find is that the average dwell time is very similar for all brands in the market around 35 minutes of average visit duration. The fastest average visit turnover time is that of KFC, Domino’s Pizza and McDonald’s around 34 minutes. Burger King and Quick have slightly longer average dwell times of 36 minutes. 

Pizza Hut, however, has the longest dwell time of 46 minutes. That’s 12 minutes longer than competitor Domino’s Pizza, which focuses on take-away, and 9 minutes longer than the market average. For reference, when we compare it to another well-known restaurant chain that wasn’t included in the analysis, Lunch Garden, that’s still 5 minutes longer. This can easily be explained by the all-you-can eat menus at Pizza Hut, which makes some visitors set up their proverbial camp at the buffet.

Who’s the fastest?

The story from these dwell times is reinforced and nuanced by our dwell time bucket feature, which groups and counts visits of different durations for a more granular visual representation of dwell time. See the graph below for further details. 

Interestingly, Domino’s Pizza is one of the fastest serving restaurants. It has 40% of its customers leave in under 15 minutes, which is significantly higher than its competitors. Of Domino's clientele 64% leave within the first 30 minutes. This outperforms any restaurant in the analysis in terms of speed with an average of 54%. Domino’s is followed by KFC with 59%. 

On average, 70% of Belgian fast food restaurant visitors have left the restaurant after 45 minutes, with McDonald’s (73%) turning around only slightly faster than Quick & Burger King. After an hour, 81% of visitors have left the average restaurant, with KFC and McDonald’s leading with 85% and 84% respectively. Domino’s Pizza, loses its initial lead in turnover time mentioned in the previous paragraph and falls back to the average. Pizza Hut with their longer format serving, has 30% of the visitors stay over an hour, which is a third higher than average.

Conclusion

McDonald’s remains the most popular player in the Belgian fast food market, with a similar visit share (40%) to Burger King and Quick combined (39%). McDonald’s has the most restaurants of all burger restaurants (117) but also draws the most visits per restaurant of all fast food chains.

Domino’s Pizza leads in visits among the pizza chains, with a 10% slice of the Belgian fast food pie, but draws the least visits per store of any fast food chain. Pizza Hut draws less visitors in total, but draws more than twice as many customers per restaurant than Domino’s.

Saturday is the busiest day of the week, with its dinnertime being the busiest moment of the week in fast food. Weekends are more popular than weekdays, with Mondays and Tuesdays being the least popular days of the week by a large margin. The most popular lunch hour of the week is on Wednesdays between 12h and 13h.

KFC and Domino’s Pizza have the quickest average turnover rate, or the lowest dwell time. People stay far longer at Pizza Hut than other fast food restaurants or 12 minutes longer than at Domino’s pizza, because of their all-you-can-eat format. Domino’s on the other hand serves food the fastest, with 64% of its clients leaving within the first 30 minutes, while Pizza hut has 70% of customers leave within the first hour.

Accurat: We understand Consumer Behaviour

Accurat is a leader in retail, media and real estate location intelligence, active in BeNeLux and Germany. By understanding real-world consumer behaviour, we empower brands to improve decision-making.