Stacked's booth watches four tables in 60 seconds, and its 65% matches a 2019 poll of parents

Stacked, the Canadian breakfast and lunch chain with more than 170 restaurants, released its first national brand film on October 8, 2026, four days before Thanksgiving. The 60-second film is narrated by one of its own booths and asks Canadians to make more time for meals together. It leans on one number: 65% of Canadians wish their family ate together more.

One booth, four tables

The camera never leaves a single booth. Over a minute, that booth watches four groups come and go: friends at a weekly Sunday brunch, a retired couple who have taken the same seats every Tuesday for years, a youth soccer team celebrating a win, and a family singing "Happy Birthday" over a candle in a stack of pancakes. Stacked says each scene is one its servers see every week.

The Toronto agency King Street Media wrote and produced the film, shot it in one day and used a cast of nearly 50 people. The campaign, called "Life Happens Around the Table", runs on YouTube (including on TV screens), Instagram and Facebook through December 14, in 30-, 15- and 6-second cuts.

Danica Brett, Stacked's Vice President of Marketing, framed the pitch around the holiday. "A lot of families will sit down together this weekend for Thanksgiving, then go back to eating in the car on Tuesday," she said in the company's release. "We think the table deserves more than one weekend a year." Then the line that gives the game away, said with a straight face: "That's what a breakfast restaurant is for."

A chain that has opened more than 70 restaurants in the past two years, by its own count, is entitled to think the table should be one of its tables. The film itself is a pleasant minute of pancakes and birthday candles, and the booth is a charming narrator.

Where the 65% comes from

Stacked's release gives no date, no sample and no link for it.

The same number, from the same pollster, appears in a release dated February 26, 2020. That survey was commissioned by McDonald's Canada, which was promoting its own Wednesday "Family Nights" at the time. It was run online on the Angus Reid Forum from November 22 to November 26, 2019, with 1,522 Canadians aged 18 to 54 who are parents of at least one child aged 2 to 12. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.

In that survey, 98% of parents said eating together as a family is important, and nearly two-thirds, 65%, wished their family did it more often. Stacked's release does not say that its figure is the same survey, so we cannot confirm it. The match in number and pollster is close enough that readers should know the 65% described parents of young children in 2019, not Canadians in general in 2026, and that a fast-food chain paid for it.

The McDonald's release also lists what gets in the way: parents' work schedules (57%), children's sports and activities (33%) and social commitments (23%). At the table, phones and tablets (62%) and television (45%) hurt the time together, while conversation helps most (82%). And 76% of those parents said dining out makes life easier when they get busy.

Two restaurant companies, five years apart, have offered the same remedy for the same wish.

What 142 countries say about eating together

The strongest evidence behind the idea of the table is not an advertisement. Scientific Reports published a paper on April 22, 2026 by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (University of Oxford), Andrew Dugan (Gallup), Micah Kaats (Harvard Kennedy School) and Alberto Prati (University College London), titled "Sharing meals is associated with greater wellbeing".

Study 1 uses the Gallup World Poll, in which nationally representative samples in 142 countries and territories were asked in 2022 and 2023 how often they ate lunch or dinner with someone they knew. Across more than 150,000 respondents, people who shared more meals reported higher life evaluations, more positive emotion and less negative emotion, in almost all world regions, even after the authors controlled for income, education, employment, household size and other factors. The number of shared meals explains as much variation in wellbeing as some key socioeconomic indicators, such as income or unemployment.

The link was strongest in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where the wellbeing gap between people who eat more and fewer meals alone is larger than in any other region. The authors also found that an extra shared meal is associated with a bigger gain for people who live alone than for people who live with others, which fits the retired couple in the booth better than the soccer team.

The limits sit in the paper's own words. The authors write that they are unable to address "the key question of causation": happier people may simply share more meals, or the effect may run both ways. Respondents who skip a lunch or dinner could not be properly accounted for. The mechanisms (the quality of the conversation, the type of meal, work schedules) were not tested. The Gallup module on food and meal sharing was funded by Ajinomoto, a Japanese food corporation, which is disclosed in the paper's acknowledgements.

It is also a pair of surveys, not a trial of any campaign. Nothing in it shows that a booth, a restaurant or a 60-second film changes how often anyone sits down with someone else.

The empty chair is spreading in the US

Study 2 of the same paper turns to the United States, using the American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023 and 234,185 adults. In 2023, 26% of American adults reported eating all of their meals alone on the previous day, an increase of more than 50% since 2003. The rate was already rising before the COVID-19 pandemic and has not come back down.

Living alone explains only part of it: the authors estimate that the rise in solo households accounts for 17% of the increase. The rise was largest among people who share a home with others, from 12% to 18%, against 55% to 69% among those living alone, a 25% rise. The authors count the 12% to 18% move as the largest increase since 2003, a rise of 50%, in households where a shared table is at least possible.

The paper has no Canadian time series. For Canada, the Vanier Institute of the Family noted in a 2016 article that data for 1996 to 2005 showed workers spending less time on family meals and more likely to eat at least one meal alone, and that one-person households made up 27.6% of Canadian homes in the 2011 census. For the United Kingdom, the same article cites a 2010 survey in which 25% of families ate together nearly every day, one in 10 never had an evening meal together, and one in five spent less than 10 minutes at the table together.

An old lament, and the price of the bird

The worry is not new. Paul Fieldhouse, writing for the Vanier Institute, points out that every generation has lamented the death of the family meal, and that in the 1920s people were already blaming leisure activities and the rise of the car. He cites the sociologist Anne Murcott, who suggests the lament may be a reaction to feared changes in how families are arranged.

He is also wary of polling. "Market research survey polls provide wildly varying data on family meals," he writes: in 2013, one commercial company reported that eight in 10 Canadian families ate together at least four times a week, and in 2014 the same company reported, for another client, that only two in 10 did so more than twice a week. That is a useful thing to remember beside a chain's 65%.

Fieldhouse adds two cautions that cut against the sentimental version of the story. A recent study by two US sociologists, he writes, suggests that most of the links between family meals and good outcomes for young people trace back to the family's socio-economic situation, which makes regular meals more likely in the first place. And the meal itself is work: the "deciding and doing", from menus to shopping to clearing up, is largely invisible and still predominantly performed by women. He also describes the meal as a gift with a cost, "a symbolic demonstration of the care of the meal provider", that may tilt toward love or toward duty. Whoever pays for it pays in time as well as money.

In money, the bill is climbing. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, estimates that a traditional turkey dinner for a family of four will cost about $35.72 this Thanksgiving, roughly 10 percent more than the $32.48 of 2025.

Stacked's campaign has until December 14 to show whether people who watched a booth narrate their own habits then sat down to eat, with someone, on a Tuesday.

Sources

• Stacked's First National Brand Campaign is Inviting Canadians Back to the Table, Stacked Pancake & Breakfast House via CNW, October 8, 2026
• Sharing meals is associated with greater wellbeing, De Neve, Dugan, Kaats and Prati, Scientific Reports, April 22, 2026
• New study reveals that today's busy lifestyles are causing Canadian families to eat together less, McDonald's Canada via CNW, February 26, 2020