Customers dine at a restaurant in the Quantang community of Changsha, central China's Hunan Province, Sept. 19, 2020. (Xinhua/Chen Sihan)

China's catering industry recovered in December 2020, with the scale of consumption rebounding to the same level seen a year earlier, official data shows.

The industry's revenue rose 0.4 percent year on year in December last year, up 1 percentage point from the figure for November 2020, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Catering companies actively responded to the COVID-19 epidemic by enriching the variety and improving the quality of products, innovating online and offline business models, and accelerating the development of online ordering and the delivery of semi-cooked food, said the ministry.

Last year, the total revenue of the catering industry fell 16.6 percent from 2019, narrowing the decline by 16.2 percentage points from the first half of 2020.