Pingo Doce's 256-Restaurant Footprint and Continente's Cozinha Continente Drive a Fair-Competition Fight Inside Portugal's Restaurant Sector — AHRESP Says Microenterprises Cannot Match the Central-Kitchen Model

Portugal's two biggest grocery chains are now also two of its largest restaurant operators, and a Sunday Público Fugas reportage frames the consequences for a traditional restaurant sector that already counts as one of the most stressed SME segments in the country. Pingo Doce, the Jerónimo Martins flagship, runs 256 in-store restaurants nationwide under its Comida Fresca banner — a footprint built largely from a central kitchen in Odivelas that prepares ready meals for distribution to outlets across the country. The chain opened 19 new restaurant points last year and is on a public glide-path to overtake McDonald's as Portugal's single largest restaurant chain by site count.

Continente, the Sonae chain, is rolling out a parallel concept it calls Cozinha Continente: pizzas and grilled dishes prepared on-site at hypermarket locations, sold both for take-away and at in-store seating. Sonae has guided to 20 new stores per year over the next five years, targeting roughly 500 hypermarkets and supermarkets nationwide by 2030. Each new opening is, by design, also a new outlet for prepared meals.

The AHRESP Position

The Associação da Hotelaria, Restauração e Similares de Portugal (AHRESP), which represents the bulk of the country's traditional restaurant operators, has been explicit through this spring's policy debate that the central-kitchen model is not competing on a level field with neighbourhood restaurants. AHRESP's argument is structural: chains integrated with supermarket logistics enjoy economies of scale on inputs, negotiating power against suppliers, and a single-VAT footprint on the sales side that microenterprises cannot match. The association has formally asked the government to exclude large-scale operators — fast-food chains and supermarket restaurants among them — from the targeted support measures designed to help the sector through 2026.

The financial backdrop is unfriendly. Food costs rose 4.8% across 2025 and accelerated to 6.4% year-on-year by March 2026. More than 1,000 traditional restaurants closed in 2025, with margins that AHRESP describes as extremamente deprimidas. The contrast with the chains is sharp: Sonae's grocery and hospitality segments are growing in tandem; Jerónimo Martins's Comida Fresca is one of the highest-margin units in its Portuguese mix.

The Regulatory Frame

The supermarkets push lands at a complicated time for Portuguese competition policy. The Autoridade da Concorrência has fined the same chains repeatedly through the last four years for price-fixing arrangements with consumer-goods suppliers — €24.6 million in 2021, €19.5 million in 2022, €16.9 million in 2023 — even as the Continente brand has continued to take share from Pingo Doce in the underlying grocery market. The restaurants question is qualitatively different — it touches sectoral rules rather than concertation behaviour — but it lands on a regulator already engaged with the chains.

What This Means for Expats

• Cheaper eating-out option. Comida Fresca and Cozinha Continente sit at €5-€9 for a hot prato do dia, well below the €12-€16 typical at a neighbourhood tasca. For weekday lunch budgets, the supermarket option is now genuinely competitive.
• Quality is improving. Both chains have invested heavily in fresh-prepared categories. Cozinha Continente pizzas and grilled fish are made on-site; Pingo Doce's central-kitchen meals are reheated at point-of-sale.
• Neighbourhood restaurants are under real pressure. If you have a favourite local marisqueira or cervejaria, the closure rate suggests it may not survive the year. The 1,000-plus 2025 closures were concentrated in microenterprises with one or two locations.
• Watch the menu-do-dia VAT line. Restaurant meals attract the intermediate IVA rate (13%) on the meal and 23% on alcohol; supermarket take-away meals follow the food-product 6% on most items. This asymmetry is part of AHRESP's complaint.
• Working from a Portuguese supermarket. Increasingly viable. Both chains have added seating, free Wi-Fi and longer opening hours at flagship sites. The Cozinha Continente concept in particular reads like a deliberate competitor to neighbourhood cafés.