RC Show 2026 takeaways: The hangover is temporary, but the future of hospitality is forever

We’re back from RC Show 2026, and our feet still hurt. If yours don’t, you weren’t doing it right. Thousands of hospitality rebels converged at the International Centre in Mississauga, ON, to talk shop, shuck oysters and figure out how to keep the lights on in an economy that feels like it was designed by a chaotic toddler.

Employment Hero was in the thick of it. We didn’t just go for the free espresso (though the Latte Art Championship was a religious experience). We went to listen to the heartbeat of an industry that refuses to quit.

Hospitality is Canada’s fourth-largest employer. That’s 1.2 million people showing up every day to make sure the rest of the country is fed and watered. But as we saw over three days, the old ways of managing those people are officially cooked. If you missed the show or were too busy at the Bar & Beverage Stage to take notes, here’s the spicy reality of what we learned.

Stop treating labour like a math problem

Day one was Independent Restaurants Day. The room was packed with owners who are tired of being told to “just hire more people.” The “Mistake Stories” panel was a breath of fresh air because it finally admitted the truth: we’ve all been doing it wrong.

The biggest takeaway? Labour isn’t a line item. It’s a community!

There’s another reality operators kept raising in the hallways: the labour pipeline itself is tightening. Changes to foreign worker programs mean fewer experienced cooks and kitchen staff entering the country, and many restaurants that relied on international hires are now competing for a smaller pool of talent. Hiring has always been tough in hospitality, but right now it feels like everyone is fishing in the same pond.

We heard from Jennifer Low at Sarang Kitchen about neuroinclusion. This isn’t some HR buzzword. It’s a survival strategy. While everyone else is fighting over the same five experienced servers, the smart operators are widening the net. They’re looking at talent pools that have been ignored for decades.

If your hiring process is still a “resume in the hand” or a “post on a generic board” situation, you’re losing. The future belongs to the operators who design jobs around humans, not humans around shifts.

The “broken rung” is a fire hazard

Women in Hospitality Day (Day Two) hit hard. We know the stats. Women make up the majority of the workforce in this industry, yet they vanish when you look at the executive level. Janet Zuccarini and Kelly Higginson didn’t hold back in their fireside chat.

The industry has a “broken rung” problem. It’s not that women aren’t capable; it’s that the structures in place are still built for a 1950s version of leadership.

At Employment Hero, we’re obsessed with this. If you aren’t providing a clear, transparent path for your team to grow, they’re going to grow somewhere else. Representation isn’t about being “nice.” It’s about not losing your best leaders to a tech firm or a competitor who actually offers a career path instead of just a paycheck.

Tech is your sous chef, not your master

Day Three was “Into the Beyond,” and Colonel Chris Hadfield basically told us that running a restaurant is like piloting a spaceship. High pressure, zero room for error and a team that needs to trust you with their lives (or at least their livelihoods).

The “Tech Strategies from the Top” panel was a much-needed reality check. There is too much “tech sprawl” in hospitality. Operators told us the same thing over and over again: their systems don’t talk to each other. Scheduling lives in one platform, payroll in another, HR somewhere else and the POS sitting in its own universe. The idea of a “best-in-one” ecosystem that brings these tools together, instead of stitching together multiple vendors, clearly resonated with people who are tired of juggling logins just to run a shift.

The consensus? Integration is the only way forward. If your tech doesn’t talk to each other, you’re just creating more work for yourself. You should be spending your time on the floor with your guests or in the kitchen with your team, not in a back office wrestling with a spreadsheet that refuses to format.

Technology should be invisible. It should just work. It should make the “boring stuff” (like tax compliance, payroll runs and shift swaps) happen while you sleep. That’s exactly the kind of problem we built Employment Hero’s Employment Operating System to solve: bringing HR, payroll, hiring and workforce management into one connected platform instead of five separate tools.

The stats you can’t ignore

We spent a lot of time at the “Stats with Sara” session. Here is the cold, hard data on the state of full-service restaurants in 2026:

The margin for error is thinner than a carpaccio. You can’t afford to be “pretty good” at people management anymore. You have to be elite.

Real talk: The culture debt

We heard a lot about “Psychological Safety” on the Speaker Stage. Michael Landsberg and Kris Hall from The Burnt Chef Project laid it out: the “yes chef” culture of fear is dying. And good riddance.

The new generation of hospitality workers, the ones you actually want to hire, don’t care about your “fast-paced environment” if it means they’re going to burn out in three months. They want to know they can raise a concern without getting their hours cut. They want to know their mental health matters. If you don’t build a culture of safety, you’re accruing “culture debt.” Eventually, the bill comes due in the form of a mass walkout or a reputation that makes you unhirable.

How to actually use this info

The RC Show is a lot of noise. It’s beautiful, loud, smelling-like-truffle-oil noise. But if you go back to your restaurant and change nothing, you just spent three days on a very expensive field trip.

Here is the Employment Hero playbook for taking these RC Show 2026 learnings and making them work for you:

1. Kill the paperwork

If you are still using paper timesheets or a WhatsApp group to manage 40 people, stop it. It’s 2026. Use a platform that automates the nonsense so you can actually lead.

2. Audit your leadership

Look at your management team. Does it reflect your workforce? If not, why? Start the mentorship programs now. Don’t wait for a “diversity initiative.” Just start promoting the people who are doing the work.

3. Lean into the data

Know your numbers. If you don’t know your labour cost percentage in real-time, you’re flying blind. Use tools that give you a dashboard, not a headache.

4. Be human

This was the underlying theme of the whole show. Whether it was Chockie Tom talking about cultural integrity in spirits or the burger showdown, the winners were the ones who stayed human.

The robots aren’t coming for the hospitality industry. People will always want to gather, eat, and drink in spaces that feel real. Our job is to make sure the people running those spaces aren’t too exhausted to be human.

The bottom line

The hospitality industry in Canada is at a crossroads. We can keep doing things the hard way, the way we’ve “always done them,” and watch our margins evaporate. Or we can embrace the “Into the Beyond” mindset. We can use technology to give us our time back. We can build cultures that people actually want to be a part of, and turn hospitality from a “transitional job” into a world-class career.

At Employment Hero, we’re here for the rebels. The ones who saw the chaos of the last few years and decided to double down. The ones who know that the secret to a great guest experience isn’t the food—it’s the person serving it. We’re already looking forward to RC Show 2027. But between now and then, we have a lot of work to do. Let’s get to it.

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