What is the future of Red Lobster?

This week’s episode of the Restaurant Business podcast A Deeper Dive features Victor Fernandez, the vice president of insights and knowledge at GuestXM.

GuestXM provides industry performance metrics, notably the Black Box index of industry sales and traffic.

I wanted Victor on the podcast so we could talk about the state of full-service restaurants, particularly a certain seafood chain that is filing for bankruptcy. We talked during the National Restaurant Show in Chicago.

Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy last month and has already closed 100 locations. It could close a lot more than that if it can’t renegotiate leases.

There are plenty of reasons Red Lobster is in this situation, but we wanted to get an assessment of the full-service climate, and how much that might have contributed. We talked about a host of other topics during the conversation as well, so it was a great snapshot of the state of the restaurant industry right now.