On the menu: Sustainability at the world’s largest restaurant chains
· 17 min read
📊 Download the report & dataset (300+ KPIs) on the sustainability of restaurant companies
The world now eats out on the order of a billion times a day, and the largest chains feed more people than entire nations: McDonald’s alone serves tens of millions daily from around 40,000 restaurants. Behind each order sits one of the longest and most opaque supply chains in the global economy. Food production already accounts for roughly a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the restaurant sits at the very end of that chain, where land, water and livestock are finally converted into a meal served in moments.
Following the release of illuminem’s NATURE100™, the first-ever global ranking of the best companies in nature impact, overseen by leading scientists and practitioners and celebrated by companies from Kering to Wise, as well as the unveiling of the world’s most sustainable breweries and luxury watchmakers, we now turn our lens to an industry at the heart of everyday life. Drawing again on the Sustainability Data Hub™ – tracking over 300 environmental and nature-related KPIs across more than 13,000 companies – and on the world’s largest community of sustainability experts, illuminem presents the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the sustainability of the restaurant industry.
The global quick-service market was worth around $297 billion in 2025 and is set to nearly triple to roughly $885 billion by 2033, growing close to 15% a year.
North America still accounts for 43% of the market, but the sharpest growth is in Asia Pacific: Burger King alone plans to triple its Chinese footprint from about 1,250 outlets to more than 4,000 by 2035. Unlike an industry defined by one scarce material, the restaurant sector’s footprint is spread across several, and each tells a different part of the story. Every point of growth means more raw ingredients, more packaging and more energy pushed through the supply chain, which is exactly why where the sector sources and how it wastes matter far beyond any single meal.
For every chain that serves it, beef is the most emissions-intensive item on the menu: a single kilogram emits around 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases, roughly ten times the footprint of chicken and sixty times that of peas. Two-thirds of that comes from the animals and farms themselves, another quarter from clearing land to graze them. Cattle ranching remains the single largest driver of Amazon deforestation, behind roughly 80% of deforested land.
The Sustainability Data Hub™ records Wendy’s, whose identity is built on the square beef patty, at an all-scopes carbon intensity of around 4,250 tonnes of CO₂ per million dollars of revenue, against roughly 445 for Chipotle. However, beyond the beef, the picture is more nuanced.
Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Restaurant Brands International, Yum! Brands, Domino’s and Papa John’s are all heavily franchised, counting the emissions of every restaurant across their systems while booking as revenue from those franchisees only the royalties and fees they pay. Chipotle, Darden and Yum China, meanwhile, run their own restaurants and report every sale.
Franchised chains therefore carry far more carbon for each dollar they report, which is why the six of them post the six highest figures here. Comparing like with like isolates the menu: Domino’s and Papa John’s are as heavily franchised as the burger chains, yet sit at around 1,110 to 1,210, against 4,250 for Wendy’s, a burger giant.
Food waste is another front, and its scale is planetary. A 2026 study in Nature Climate Change put the emissions of global food waste at 19% of all food-system emissions, some 4 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent a year; were it a country, wasted food would rank as the third-largest emitter on earth. Restaurants are among the heaviest contributors, with quick-service outlets discarding an estimated 10 to 15% of their food and the overwhelming majority of that surplus going to landfill rather than to donation or compost, where it rots into methane far more potent than carbon dioxide. The scale hides inside individual chains: Darden leaves more than two-thirds of its waste unrecovered, and across the United States restaurant food waste runs to tens of billions of pounds a year.
But beneath these figures lies a deeper exposure the industry has never priced: its dependence on nature itself, on the pollinators, soils and stable water systems that every crop and every animal requires. The Data Hub™ reveals that Chipotle, McDonald’s, Darden and Yum! Brands each register the maximum possible reliance on functioning ecosystems, and due to the nature of the food industry, even the least dependent company in the field, Wendy’s, still registers well over half that maximum.
Placing a financial value on that dependence, the Data Hub™ puts the value each company has exposed to nature loss at $12.5 billion for McDonald’s and $7.8 billion for Yum China, the largest single exposures in the field. And the damage flows back to the land the industry stands on: nearly half of Darden’s locations, and more than 40% of Brinker’s and Chipotle’s, sit in ecosystems already measurably in decline. The industry that depends on nature most completely is also among those eroding it fastest.
With the pressure on the industry mounting, calls for change are now increasingly arriving through the courts, through Brussels, and through the balance sheet, and they are reshaping how the biggest chains behave.
During the wave of climate ambition of recent years, companies across the food sector set out bold goals and labels, from “carbon neutral” products to “net zero” commitments. Regulators have since drawn clearer lines around what can be claimed. In late 2025, two of the largest American meat suppliers, JBS and Tyson, agreed historic settlements that saw them retire “net zero” and “climate-smart” language from their beef marketing. One of the most visible trends in the industry is a move toward fewer but better-evidenced green claims.
The single most consequential regulatory lever is the European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products, which from 30 December 2026 will require companies to trace commodities such as beef, soy and palm oil back to the land they came from. Investors are pushing in the same direction: FAIRR, a $70-trillion-backed coalition of institutional investors focused on the environmental risks of animal agriculture, ran a landmark engagement with the six largest listed fast-food chains, McDonald’s, Yum! Brands, Chipotle, Domino’s, Wendy’s and Restaurant Brands International, that moved the group from just one holding a science-based target to five committing to one inside a single year.
Some chains have concluded that the fastest way to cut beef’s footprint is to attack the cow’s methane directly. Chipotle’s Cultivate Next venture fund, part of a $100 million commitment, has backed CH4 Global, which produces a seaweed-based feed additive shown to suppress the methane cattle belch, alongside Plantible, a lentil-protein developer. It is a striking wager for a company that owns no farms: rather than wait for the beef industry to decarbonise, it is buying into the technology that might force it. The category is young and unproven at scale, but it points to where the serious money is now looking.
The customer may yet prove the most powerful force reshaping the menu. Across Europe, 51% of consumers now say they are actively reducing their meat intake, 27% identify as flexitarian, and in the United States that figure rises to 37%; among Gen Z, some 61% say they are willing to eat less meat. The shift in sentiment has seen McDonald’s roll out the McPlant, and Burger King its plant-based Whoppers under Restaurant Brands International. Yet the gap between sentiment and plate remains wide: plant-based items still make up just 8 to 10% of menus across most European quick-service chains, and several high-profile launches have been quietly withdrawn after demand proved softer than the surveys suggested.
While diners in Europe are beginning to eat less meat, the global picture may be running the other way. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), per capita intake of animal-source foods is projected to grow 6% globally by 2034, and 24% in lower middle-income countries, driven by rising incomes, urbanisation and changing diets. Output of meat, dairy and eggs is set to grow 17% over the same period.
Beyond the food, a restaurant’s footprint extends further downstream. Since the launch of online food-delivery platform Just Eat at the turn of the millennium, dozens of providers have saturated a market that now serves around 2.1 billion people. DoorDash handled some 3.2 billion orders in 2025, close to 9 million a day, and on a single day in July 2025 Meituan processed more than 100 million food-delivery orders in China. With one study finding around 96 grams of packaging in every order, the case for a new generation of circular materials has never been stronger.
Among the ten largest listed restaurant companies, illuminem’s ranking, the most comprehensive yet conducted in the sector, crowns Restaurant Brands International, Papa John’s and McDonald’s as its sustainability leaders.
Reflecting the 300+ KPIs across which the Sustainability Data Hub™ tracks the brands, the final order was judged by far more than carbon intensity alone. Where Darden posts the lowest all-scopes intensity in the field and nevertheless finishes last, Wendy’s posts the highest and finishes sixth. What separates the leaders is breadth: validated targets, consistent disclosure and, for the top two, a clean controversy record.
1️⃣ Restaurant Brands International (50%) tops the table on the strength of steady movement across a sprawling empire. The owner of Burger King, Tim Hortons, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs paired a fresh Restaurant Brands for Good report in April 2026 with broad disclosure across more than 33,000 restaurants in over 120 countries, a validated target to halve emissions by 2030, and a clean controversy record. Its nature record is the quiet standout: just 15.8% of its sites sit in declining ecosystems, the best figure in the field, and it is the only company in the ranking whose exposure to water risk the Data Hub™ rates as low, a function of a footprint concentrated in urban and suburban locations rather than ecologically fragile ones. The challenge is the supply chain behind four large brands, which keeps its all-scopes carbon intensity, at around 3,050, among the highest here, and renewables at just 14% of its energy. As it chases an aggressive $60 billion systemwide-sales target for 2028, holding that line while it grows will be the real test.
2️⃣ Papa John’s International (48%) is the ranking’s quiet climber. A business built on dough, cheese and tomato rather than beef posts an all-scopes carbon intensity of around 1,110, roughly a quarter of Wendy’s, and the lightest nature footprint of any chain except for Wendy’s: the smallest value exposed to nature loss in the field, at around $0.8 billion, and the second-smallest toll on biodiversity. It holds a science-based target and carries no recorded controversies. The weaknesses sit closer to home. Its direct-operations carbon intensity is the third highest here; it reports no renewable energy share and did not disclose to CDP, and of the Papa John’s locations the Data Hub™ could assess, 778 of 1,072, nearly three-quarters, sit inside legally protected natural areas. A naturally lighter footprint has carried it this far; turning that advantage into measured progress is the next step.
3️⃣ McDonald’s (47%) became the first global restaurant company to set an SBTi-approved emissions target, and its 2015 commitment to eliminate supply-chain deforestation predated almost every rival. While its $12.5 billion of value exposed to nature loss is the largest in the field, the unavoidable arithmetic of the world’s biggest beef buyer, its supply chain’s toll on biodiversity is the third lightest here, behind only Wendy’s and Papa John’s. The greenwashing complaint filed against it in Munich in May 2026 is the flip side of that visibility, a reminder that the largest chain on earth will be held to its every word, but for a company this size, moving even a few percentage points is a planetary act.
4️⃣ Chipotle Mexican Grill (45%) is the clearest case of a company clean on carbon and heavy on nature. It holds an SBTi-validated target to halve emissions across all three scopes by 2030, draws 22% of its energy from renewables, the highest share of any company here that reports one, and posts an all-scopes carbon intensity of roughly 445, the second lowest in the field. Unlike the franchised giants, it owns and operates nearly all its restaurants, and it has spent that control aggressively upstream, including its Cultivate Next fund bankrolling methane-suppressing cattle feed and alternative proteins. Yet the fresh-ingredient supply chain that keeps its carbon low weighs heavily on nature: the Data Hub™ places it in the worst tier for the value it has riding on nature loss, rates its reliance on ecosystems at the maximum, and finds 42% of its restaurants standing in ecosystems already measurably in decline. Its record also still carries the food-safety outbreaks of 2015 to 2018, which ended in a $25 million federal fine in 2020, the largest ever in a US food-safety case.
5️⃣ Brinker International (44%) is the great commercial comeback story of the sector, after years of falling traffic in the 2010s. Now, its Chili’s brand has just posted its 21st consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth, a 71% cumulative rise over five years, one of the most dramatic turnarounds in American dining. The environmental picture is quieter and, on nature, heavier: it reports no renewable energy, its casual-dining kitchens are among the thirstiest here, and 43.5% of its sites sit in declining ecosystems, the second-worst in the field. The proximity data sharpens the concern: of the 1,218 Brinker locations assessed, 760 sit inside legally protected natural areas. A company that has proved it can execute a hard turnaround has yet to point that same discipline at its footprint.
6️⃣ Wendy’s (41%) has built more scaffolding around the problem of beef than most: an SBTi-validated target to cut supply-chain emissions 55% per tonne of goods purchased by 2030, and a no-deforestation commitment across beef, soy, palm and paper. The limits are just as clear. Its all-scopes carbon intensity of around 4,250 is the highest in the field, and in 2025 a shareholder proposal argued the company had yet to show credible progress on the single largest source of its emissions. Of the Wendy’s locations assessed in the Data Hub™, roughly two-thirds, 518 of 777, sit inside legally protected natural areas, and 100 in areas the Data Hub™ flags as sensitive for biodiversity, the highest count in the ranking.
7️⃣ Domino’s Pizza (39%) is the quiet mid-table case, a company whose environmental profile is defined as much by what it has not disclosed as by what it has. On the credit side, it became the first US pizza company to win Science Based Targets initiative validation for its Forest, Land and Agriculture targets, backing a formal no-deforestation commitment across the cheese, wheat and meat that make up its footprint, and it has begun rolling out an electric delivery fleet. But the reporting behind those pledges is thin: beyond a handful of self-reported emissions figures, Domino’s surfaces little of the nature, water and ecosystem data its peers now put forward, leaving the ambition of its targets resting on a base too shallow to verify.
8️⃣ ex aequo Yum China (34%) is the ranking’s sharpest paradox, finishing in the bottom three while holding some of the strongest external credentials of anyone here. It was the first restaurant company in China to secure SBTi-approved near-term targets, aiming to cut its direct emissions 63% by 2035, it is the only company in the field to score B on all three CDP questionnaires, for climate, forests and water, and with women making up 69% of its workforce and 46% of its board, it leads the field on gender balance. And yet the Data Hub™ reveals why medals are not performance: its Scope 1 and 2 carbon intensity of around 200 is by far the highest of any company here, its water intensity is the highest in the field, and more of its own value sits exposed to the loss of nature than any other company in the ranking. Its earlier commitment to a science-based net-zero target has also since been removed. Running more than 17,000 restaurants across a coal-heavy grid, on which renewables supply just 2% of its electricity, Yum China’s underlying footprint has yet to catch up with the ambition of its disclosure.
8️⃣ ex aequo Yum! Brands (34%) is among the most decorated companies in the field, which makes its placing all the more instructive. The parent of KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Habit Burger holds years of Dow Jones Sustainability Index membership, and a validated target to cut emissions per franchise restaurant 46% by 2030, against which it had already delivered a 28% cut by 2023. Yet the Data Hub™ marks the limit of that progress: an all-scopes carbon intensity of around 4,040, among the highest here, and its supply chain inflicts the single heaviest toll on biodiversity of any company in this ranking, and by a clear margin, the mark of feeding three global brands on chicken, beef and dairy. Its science-based net-zero commitment has also lapsed. Strong recognition, harder reality.
🔟 Darden Restaurants (25%), the US casual-dining group behind Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse and Ruth’s Chris, finishes last despite posting the lowest all-scopes carbon intensity in the field, at around 370, a figure flattered by the high revenue per meal of sit-down dining. Its menu is heavily weighted toward steak, and the rest of the Data Hub™ reflects the cost: a water withdrawal intensity of roughly 1,490, second only to Yum China, the worst ecosystem record of any company in the ranking, with nearly half its locations, 49.6%, sitting in ecosystems already in decline, and more than two-thirds of its waste never recovered. Where it does stand out is people: at 58% female employees and a third female board, its workforce is among the most balanced here. But with no science-based target, no renewable energy reported, no CDP disclosure and thin upstream traceability, a company whose menu leans so hard on the most resource-intensive proteins has yet to seriously account for what that costs.
This ranking offers the most comprehensive study yet conducted of the restaurant industry’s sustainability transition, built on more than 300 environmental and nature-related KPIs across the ten largest listed restaurant companies.
As regulators close in on deforestation and demand traceability to the plot of land, as rules on green claims tighten, and as diners increasingly ask where their food comes from, this ranking arrives at a moment when the pressures on the sector have rarely been sharper.
Beneath the carbon across the pastures, feedlots, farms and processing plants that supply the kitchen lies a deeper signal. Most of the major chains here depend on nature at or near the maximum the Data Hub™ measures, while their supply chains rank among the heaviest for the damage done to that same nature. The leaders from here will be those that learn to measure and repay that debt before it comes due on terms they cannot meet.
The restaurant has fed civilisation in one form or another for as long as people have gathered to eat. Whether the industry that now feeds billions can keep doing so on a warming planet will now depend on what a meal is truly allowed to cost the world that grew it.
📊 Download the report & dataset (300+ KPIs) on the sustainability of restaurant companies
illuminem ranks companies by sustainability maturity using a weighted mix of criteria:
All financial and sustainability data reflect the latest figures publicly reported by the companies ranked. The approach is deliberately both backward- and forward-looking, identifying companies that are leading – or rising fast. By normalising for industry and geography, the score offers the most universal measure of how far a company has travelled on its sustainability journey.
illuminem’s Sustainability Data Hub™ is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind, with over 300 environmental and nature-related KPIs for over 13,000 companies, assembled into a single, structured view of corporate environmental performance. With a view that spans sectors, geographies, and years of disclosure history, and insights from the greatest experts and executives in the field, illuminem is uniquely positioned in the industry to create the most comprehensive report the restaurant industry has ever seen.
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