Food service
tertiary sector of the economy
The food service (US English) or catering (British and Commonwealth English) industry includes the businesses, institutions, and companies which prepare meals outside the home. It includes restaurants, grocery stores, school and hospital cafeterias, catering operations, and many other formats.
Suppliers to food service operators are food service distributors, who provide small wares (kitchen utensils) and foods. Some companies manufacture products in both consumer and food service versions. The consumer version usually comes in individual-sized packages with elaborate label design for retail sale. The food service version is packaged in a much larger industrial size and often lacks the colorful label designs of the consumer version.
Statistics
United States
The food system, including food service and food retailing, supplied $1.24 trillion worth of food in 2010 in the US. $594 billion of this was supplied by food service facilities, defined by the USDA as any place which prepares food for immediate consumption on site, including locations that are not primarily engaged in dispensing meals such as recreational facilities and retail stores. Full-service and fast food restaurants account for 77% of all food service sales, with full-service restaurants accounting for just slightly more than fast food in 2010. The shifts in the market shares between fast food and full-service restaurants to market demand changes the offerings of both foods and services of both types of restaurants.
According to the National Restaurant Association a growing trend among US consumers for the food service industry is global cuisine with 66% of US consumers eating more widely in 2015 than in 2010, 80% of consumers eating 'ethnic' cuisines at least once a month, and 29% trying a new 'ethnic' cuisine within the last year.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Food service” as tertiary sector of the economy. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as tertiary sector of the economy. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q41958. The Library of Congress control number is sh99005393. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010 and 2015.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Food service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.