Hormel: some restaurant traffic trends improving

CHICAGO, March 16 - Hormel Foods Corp is seeing some signs that customer traffic trends at restaurants are improving, its chief executive said on Monday.

Improvement in the restaurant industry could be an early indicator for an eventual economic recovery, some analysts have said. Restaurant traffic, especially in the mid-priced casual dining sector, has been under pressure for several years and was hit before the rest of the U.S. economy went into recession.

"We're seeing in our results and hearing from some of our customers that their local-based businesses, the comps (comparisons) aren't as negative as they were," Hormel CEO Jeffrey Ettinger said at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit in Chicago.

"They are still somewhat negative," Ettinger said. Hormel gets about $2 billion in sales, or about one-third of its annual sales, from restaurants and other food service customers.

The improving trend was seen in the past month at restaurants with local customer bases, he said.

"The area that still seems to be under much more pressure would be travel-based destination areas, both with individual travel being off and business travel being off," Ettinger said (For summit blog: http://blogs.reuters.com/summits/) (For more on the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit, see [ID:nSP463170])