Ask ten restaurant owners in Kyiv how business is going, and most will say some version of "surviving," not "growing." Ask the tax service and you'll hear about a boom year. Both are telling the truth. A market can set a revenue record and still feel like a slow bleed to the people running it, and understanding why matters for where operators put their energy in 2026.
A record year, on paper
Ukraine's food-service sector declared ₴246.7 billion in revenue for 2025, up 21.7% from ₴202.4 billion in 2024 and the highest figure the State Tax Service has recorded. Average daily revenue across the industry climbed from ₴553.8 million to ₴675.9 million.1
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Active businesses in the sector | 43,000+ |
| Physical locations nationwide | 51,000+ |
| National average check | ₴303 |
Growth wasn't even across formats: restaurants led with +26.9% in declared revenue, followed by the Tax Service's "закусочні" category (fast-food counters and kiosks, not sit-down dining) at +25.9%, and cafés at +20.5%.1
Where the growth is actually coming from
The Tax Service number is declared revenue — useful for sizing the market, but it doesn't show what's driving the growth. For that, live point-of-sale data is more revealing. Poster POS tracked roughly 11,000 continuously operating venues through 2025 and surveyed 200 operators directly. Their read on the same year looks very different from a simple growth headline:2
| Metric | YoY change |
|---|---|
| Revenue | +6% |
| Visits | −8% |
| Average check | +17% |
Visit frequency barely moved this year. Ticket size did the work, and the venues that couldn't raise a price without losing the table are the ones now closing.
The mechanism is straightforward: menu prices rose faster than visit frequency could compensate for. 43% of operators surveyed raised ingredient costs 10–20% over the year, and 36% raised menu prices 5–10% in response.2 That was enough to grow the top line even as the room got quieter. Profitability tells the harder part of the story: 42% of operators reported lower profitability than 2024, against 26% who improved; 9% were operating at a loss.2
Sushi and pizza outran everyone
Not every format felt the squeeze equally. Ranked by revenue growth, delivery-friendly formats with strong order economics pulled ahead of walk-in-dependent ones:2
Check size moved even more sharply than revenue at the extremes: confectioneries posted the steepest average-check increase (+25%, to ₴244), followed by bars (+21%, to ₴465) and coffee-to-go (+18%, to roughly ₴111 for coffee shops and ₴89 for takeaway). Traffic told the opposite story in the same formats: bars lost the most visits (−14%), confectioneries −13%, while sushi was the most resilient at just −1%. Sushi's growth leaned on repeat visits more than price increases, the opposite mix from most of the rest of the market.
The average venue now lives about 18 months
Opendatabot's registry analysis of new and closed food-service businesses in 2025 is the clearest picture of turnover the market has. 13,373 new food-service sole proprietorships (FOPs) registered in 2025 — down 5% from the year before. Over the same period, 10,600+ shut down.3
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| New businesses registered, 2025 | 13,373 (−5% vs 2024) |
| Businesses that closed, 2025 | 10,600+ |
| Net growth in the sector | 2,700 (roughly half of 2024's net growth) |
Half of the venues that closed this year had been open for less than 18 months.3 Read alongside the revenue and traffic numbers above, a clearer picture forms: closures are concentrated among weak concepts, and they're happening fast rather than slow. A venue without a strong enough product, brand, or unit economics to raise prices and keep its guests tends to close within a year or two rather than limp along for a decade. Meanwhile total sector revenue keeps climbing, because the venues that remain are pricing for it.
One more detail on who's actually starting these businesses: 70% of new food-service venues opened in 2025 were founded by women, according to Opendatabot's analysis, a figure worth its own conversation that this piece won't do justice to in one line.4
Five regions absorb almost half of all new openings
New-business formation is heavily concentrated. The top five regions by new food-service registrations in 2025 account for 47% of all new venues nationwide3 — unsurprising given they cover the capital and the largest regional metros, but a useful reminder of how thin the "national market" gets once you leave a handful of cities.
The chains are still opening new locations
While the median independent venue fights to hold its margin, the largest branded chains are doing something the rest of the market mostly isn't: opening new physical locations.
| Chain | Headline figure | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| McDonald's Ukraine | 121 locations | Across 30 cities and 4 villages as of Dec 25, 2025 — 12 new restaurants opened and 5 renovated during the year, on roughly ₴5bn of investment.5 |
| KFC franchisees | ₴3.66bn revenue, 2025 | Up 31.6% year over year — averaging roughly ₴60 million per restaurant annually.6 |
| Aroma Kava | 350+ locations | Across 45+ cities, serving over 1 million cups a month — Ukraine's largest coffee-to-go chain by footprint.7 |
| Coffee shops, nationwide | ~6,000 venues | Estimated count across the country, based on Poster's operator dataset.8 |
This is the same market shown from the other direction. Where the independent segment is thinning out through closures, the segment with brand recognition, standardized unit economics, and the balance sheet to absorb a bad month is still spending on square footage. Growth by location count, not just by price increases, is the tell that separates genuine expansion from a market simply repricing itself.
After Rocket's collapse, four platforms are fighting over the same orders
Order volume through delivery aggregators grew an estimated 30–40% across 2025–2026, continuing a trend that accelerated during blackout periods, when ordering in became the default rather than the backup plan.9 But the competitive map underneath that growth changed shape. Rocket, once a genuine third player, went bankrupt and exited the market.9 That should have left a duopoly. Instead, two new entrants filled the gap.
| Platform | Reach |
|---|---|
| Bolt Food | ~9M visits/month · 41 cities |
| Glovo | ~6M visits/month · 50 cities |
| Loko (Silpo) | 56 cities · 2,200+ partners |
| Mister.Am | 21 cities · cashback model, no markup |
Bolt Food leads on raw traffic, an estimated 9 million visits a month across 41 cities, with Glovo close behind at roughly 6 million visits across a wider 50-city footprint.9 But the more interesting entrant is Loko, the delivery arm Silpo (Ukraine's largest supermarket chain) launched in 2022. Loko now covers 56 cities, more than either Bolt Food or Glovo, through 2,200+ partner venues, leaning on Silpo's existing base of roughly 1.5 million app users rather than building demand from zero.10 Mister.Am is the smallest of the four by footprint (21 cities) but the most differentiated by model: no markup on partner menu prices, and a cashback-first mechanic instead of the flat commission structure the bigger players run on.11
For an operator, the practical read is this: a bankruptcy narrowed the field for a moment, but retail and independent players filled it back in almost immediately. That means the leverage a restaurant has over commission terms with any single aggregator is limited, and likely to stay that way. We've written about the actual economics of that trade-off before, in What Delivery Apps Really Charge Restaurants: 2026 Math.
What this means if you run a restaurant
Nearly everything above traces back to one mechanism: Ukraine's food-service market grew in 2025 mainly through pricing power, not through people eating out more often. Operating in a market like that calls for a different set of decisions than one growing on volume.
- Pricing power tracks the guest relationship more than the menu. Sushi grew fastest with the least traffic loss because repeat, direct ordering carries the format; bars and confectioneries, which depend on impulse footfall, lost the most guests the moment they raised prices.
- A restaurant on an aggregator only keeps part of what it earns. Take a 25–36% commission on every order, and a meaningful chunk of that hard-won 17% average-check increase never reaches the kitchen — it goes to whichever of the four delivery platforms brought the guest.
- Chain infrastructure is exactly what independents are missing: standardized ordering, loyalty data, and enough locations to absorb a bad month in one city. Platforms like Dots exist to put that within reach of a single-location or small-chain operator — an owned ordering channel, loyalty and cashback, and delivery that doesn't route the order, or its margin, through someone else first.
- Closures cluster early rather than randomly. Half the venues that shut down in 2025 hadn't made it 18 months, which points to a fast product-and-pricing failure rather than a slow market-wide decline. A fast failure is one an operator can actually fix.
Forget "dying" and forget "booming." The market stopped rewarding venues for simply existing, and started rewarding the ones that can raise a price and still keep the table — a skill that has almost nothing to do with luck.
A conservative read on where this goes next
Extrapolate the 2024→2025 nominal growth rate (21.7%) at face value and 2026 sector revenue lands somewhere past ₴300 billion. Treat that as a ceiling rather than a prediction: it assumes pricing power that isn't spread evenly, and it ignores how unevenly the war is already hitting regional demand. Poster's regional data shows traffic down 13–16% in Kyiv, Lviv and Khmelnytskyi, and flat in Chernihiv.
The direction is the reliable part, not the decimal point. Growth in 2026 will likely keep coming from pricing rather than foot traffic, unless consumer spending power changes broadly. That makes the operator-level decisions above worth more planning time than the macro number.
Book a 30-minute call — we'll show the platform on your own numbers.
Sources
- State Tax Service of Ukraine, sector revenue and business-count data, reported Feb 2026 — Ukrinform
- Poster POS, "2025 Year in Review" — Poster POS, average-check detail via Poster POS, coverage via Forbes Ukraine
- Opendatabot, "HoReCa FOP-omics 2025" — Opendatabot, additional coverage via NV Business and The Page
- Opendatabot HoReCa FOP-omics 2025, gender breakdown — coverage via Divoche.Media
- McDonald's Ukraine location count and 2025 investment — Fakty ICTV
- KFC Ukraine franchisee revenue, 2025 — The Page
- Aroma Kava chain footprint — RAU, company figures via Aroma Kava
- Nationwide coffee-shop count estimate — Forbes Ukraine
- Delivery aggregator order growth, Bolt Food / Glovo traffic and coverage — UBA.top; Rocket exit context via Mind.ua
- Loko (Silpo delivery) city coverage and partner count — RAU, Loko, market context via Forbes Ukraine
- Mister.Am coverage and pricing model — Mister.Am