If you planted hops a few years ago, anticipating continued growth in craft beer, you picked a winner. Canada’s romance with homegrown suds is just not letting up.

The latest evidence comes from Restaurants Canada. After polling more than 560 professional chefs across the country, it named craft beer and microbrews the top food trend for 2017 in its eight annual Canadian Chef Survey.

The rest of the top five trends were food smoking, charcuterie and house-cooking meats, sous vide, and locally sourced foods. This is good news for fruit and vegetable producers. Who can meet the demand for locally sourced foods like you?

The five emerging trends – the ones the chefs expect to see on the list next year, or in years to come -- are ancient grains, culinary cocktails with savoury, fresh ingredients, new cuts of meat, fermenting, and ethic or street-food inspired appetizers.

It’s significant that this list would come via a restaurant association. Traditionally, I suspect most producers considered restaurants less important of a destination for their produce than grocery stores.

But think again.

Food eaten outside of the home – much of it in restaurants, now consumes about 35-40 per cent of the food dollar.  

That’s huge. And it’s all leading to more restaurants, which now number 94,000 in Canada, and are on a roll. Restaurant numbers, according to the Conference Board of Canada, have grown by 1.8 per cent since 2011. That compares favourably to the 1.1 per cent growth in the general population, it says.

Jobs-wise, Statistics Canada recently released a labour force survey showing total employment in Canada’s foodservice industry rose to a record 1,244,600 people in 2016. That’s nearly seven per cent of the country’s total workforce.

In fact, foodservice was among the top five private-sector job creators in 2016, with employment rising by 11,000 jobs, more than double the 5,400 jobs created in 2015.

Unfortunately, some restaurants don’t succeed. You hear a lot about restaurant closures, about how hard it is to make it in the business.

And indeed, restaurant profit margins are razor thin, like they are in much of the food business.  But a lot of people are giving the restaurant business a try.

Maybe new entrants will have more odds of finding success if they focus on breakfast.

The conference board says breakfast traffic is a particularly bright spot for the industry, with breakfast meals rising by more than six per cent in 2016. They now account for almost one in five restaurant visits, and have spawned the growing popularity of all-day breakfasts at several of the well-known chains.

There’s yet another reason to consider making a direct connection with restaurants.

Despite increased competition and tight margins, restaurant prices rose in 2016, by 2.3 per cent. That was contrary to the overall price of food, which Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index shows actually fell by two per cent.

Interestingly, leading the way in that drop was fruit and vegetables, which were down 10-15 per cent in price from 2015-2016 -- thanks mainly to the drought easing in California, Canada’s main supplier of vegetables in the winter.

So the age–old argument of fruit and vegetables being too expensive to buy and serve is dealt yet another blow. 

For this and other reasons, I’m optimistic that restaurant growth bodes well for the sector, and for those who pursue it. As chefs and restaurants distinguish themselves from each other, the odds of them serving interesting side dishes and desserts increase.

That’s a great place for consumers to experience something they might cook at home…and serve alongside the likes of craft beer.