Mexican food is the most popular ethnic food type in the USA, representing 11 percent of all restaurants.

With the end of the year closely approaching and people getting ready to enjoy their favorite holiday dishes with their families, Brizo FoodMetrics, an analytics company that provides actionable analytics for companies in the foodservice industry, decided to look at the most popular ethnic food type in the USA.

As of December 2020, there are over 73,000 restaurants in operation that provide a Mexican menu, which represents 11 percent of all restaurants in the USA. That makes Mexican food the second most popular food overall, behind American food at over 342,000 restaurants in operation.

According to Brizo FoodMetrics, roughly 25 percent of those restaurants are considered fast food and include popular brands such as Taco Bell, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and Qdoba Mexican Eats.

As we take a look at our word cloud that is analyzing the most popular dishes, we find a lot of our favorite dishes with burritos and tacos appearing the most often.

Another interesting fact about the Mexican restaurants we analyzed in the US is that most of them, 70 percent, are independent restaurants and the other 30 percent are classified as chain restaurants. Brizo FoodMetrics defines a chain restaurant as having 5 or more establishments in operation, while independents will have 4 or less. There are more than 590 unique chain brands that operate over 22 thousand locations in the USA with Taco Bell making up almost 9 percent of all locations.

We decided to dig a bit deeper into the data and found that Los Angeles, New York & Chicago were the top 3 cities with the most Mexican restaurants, making up 17 percent of all Mexican restaurants in the USA.

As for how those restaurants are dealing with the COVID pandemic? They appear to have adapted quite well as 92 percent of them offer takeout and 80 percent of them offer delivery. Of those 62,000 restaurants that offer delivery, we have found that the most popular services amongst the restaurants are GrubHub with over 32,000 restaurants, Postmates with over 29,000, and DoorDash with 28,000. Seamless and UberEats are not too far behind with 20,000 and 18,000 respectively. Brizo FoodMetrics collects information from the sites of Marketplace delivery solutions to provide that information.

If you would like to learn more about Mexican restaurants in the USA, or if you are looking for data on the North American restaurant industry as a whole, click the free trial button to sign up for a free trial.