Healthy QSR: Talking the Return of the Healthy Fast Food Blues
Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is a wonderful meditation on the relationship between man and nature. No matter how messed-up we may be, there will always be the sun, the moon, the tides and the rain.
We can always count on those things to be there.
It works the same way in the restaurant business. No matter what the food or industry trends may be, no matter what the decade (or century), there will always be some executive somewhere who decides “I know…we’ll do traditional fast food, only we’ll do it healthy.”
“We’ll provide an alternative for all of the people who want the convenience of fast food, but wish they had healthier choices.”
So meet the newest foray into this territory: LYFE Kitchen
LYFE?
It is an acronym for Love Your Food Everyday.
Let's take a look at some other quick-serve restaurant (QSR) concepts:
Panera? That’s a Spanish word that translates to “bread box.” This seems to work for a restaurant that’s kind of a bready, soup and sandwich sort of place.
Chipotle? That’s a well-known ingredient in many versions of Mexican cuisine. So it makes sense that Steve Ells chose that name for his now well-known chain of fast casual Mexican restaurants.
Pei Wei? We were unable to find any precise etymology, but there were a couple of well-known Chinese dynasties named Wei. Whatever, it sounds Asiany enough to signal the Asian food one finds at this fast-casual chain.
But LYFE?
According to a report in the
Chicago Tribune, this new “healthy” fast-casual concept will be headed by two former McDonald’s executives and Oprah’s celebrity chef Art Smith.
Similar to other business clichés such as “crack the code” LYFE hopes to “...unlock the recipe to successfully selling healthy food to the masses.”
We were able to piece together a list of proposed design elements and food preparations from several features in the aforementioned
Tribune article as well as BrandChannel and
QSR Magazine:
On the design side LYFE is said to be considering:
- Rooftop herb gardens
- Biodegradable cutlery
- Grass parking lots
- Fresh flowers on tables
Those things are darned expensive add-ons to the traditional food service overhead (and imagine the liability insurance for a chain of restaurants that has employees climbing around on a roof!).
As for the food, we’ve found many proposed preparations and ideas under consideration:
- No butter, cream, high-fructose corn syrup, white sugar, white flour or fried preps
- Cream-free corn chowder
- Egg white frittatas
- Oven-baked sweet potato fries
- Agave ketchup
- Only dairy-free desserts
- Smoked-chicken sweet-pea soup
- Pork-and-sweet-potato kabobs
- Additionally, all of the ingredients will be sourced locally(!)
While we could find many faults and raise many questions, there are more fundamental issues here.
Firstly, this is not a fast-casual take on any existing cuisine. Instead, it reads like a bunch of brand attributes generated in an ideation session and listed on a white board.
After giving the matter much thought, we could find very few exceptions to the rule that a successful restaurant always relies on some version of an overarching cuisine. Even diners and fast food restaurants like McDonald’s serve an American “cuisine” that has evolved culturally over 50 to 100 years. Likewise, concepts such as Applebee’s and Chili’s have increasingly offered more globalized preparations such as Southwestern Eggrolls, but at the core there is an American cuisine. The one successful exception to the rule is Cheesecake Factory, though one could argue that at its core lies an American spirit.
The reason the cuisine issue is important is because our research has revealed that the first “top of mind” question that arises when deciding to dine out is
the category of cuisine—Thai, Sushi, Pizza, etc. LYFE as proposed above appears to have no such unified cuisine.
Indeed, if you click on the “about” link on
LYFE’s Facebook page, there is no mention of food at all. Instead they describe themselves as a “transformational, socially responsible ‘lifestyle’ brand whose acronym stands for Love Your Food Everyday.”
Hey guys, what about the food?
Equally important—and we are by no means the first to recognize this finding—people dining out express a consistent desire for indulgence. Other than a very small group of consumers, I can’t imagine anyone indulging in Vegan desserts.
To be fair, all parties involved have admitted that they have a difficult challenge ahead of them, and we by no means wish them failure or ill will.
But the fundamental point the founders of LYFE fail to understand is that the answer to the consumer desire for healthier eating options already exists, and the demand is already being met. It exists in the form of an entire restaurant category known as fast casual.
To the extent that consumers dining out are thinking about issues surrounding health, their concerns are not with specific ingredients or cooking techniques. Nor are they looking for “better for you” versions of existing foods (i.e., vegan chocolate cake, egg white frittatas).
What they are looking for are higher quality foods, where quality is an overarching proposition with an assortment of drivers. Consumers don’t know—or care—about the flour used by California Pizza Kitchen. They just know it is higher quality—and thus healthier—because the pizza is “thin,” it isn’t so “goopy” and they use lots of unique and interesting ingredients.
Similarly consumers at Chipotle aren’t studying the calories or the ingredient deck. They “know it’s better,” because they watch the food being made and it looks and tastes “fresher.” That’s all they need—and want—to know.
And in a very specific study of the needs of young, “health seeking” diners conducted several years ago, we found that the healthiest perceived hamburgers were those from the local “old school” restaurants, the most iconic being “In-N-Out.” This may seem very counterintuitive, but the logic was as follows: “There probably is no such thing as a truly healthy hamburger, so if I’m going to have one, I might as well indulge and have the best-tasting, highest quality version possible.” Note here that this particular form of indulgence is not about the “gut buster” concoctions found on menus like Red Robin—a half pound of beef smothered in Guacamole and bacon. It’s about something that is an iconic benchmark of the cuisine.
A burger made from locally sourced meat with agave ketchup is simply irrelevant from a healthy eating standpoint. For those who are interested in eating more healthfully are never going to waste an indulgent hamburger moment on anything but the best (i.e., In-N-Out).
The locally sourced burger with agave ketchup and wheat flour bun may make sense from the perspective of somebody looking at food trends and tinkering with food ingredients, but that’s just not how consumers eat in the real world.
Health vs. Indulgence When Dining Out
For years, Hartman Group analysts have documented that when dining out, consumers rarely consider nutritional information, because they understand that the occasion is defined by indulgence and, therefore, irrelevant.
Of interest to weight management issues facing consumers today, our most recent study
How America Eats finds that in addition to the occasion being framed by indulgence, in most cases meals consumed away from home do not conform to socially shared values and rules that govern family/household eating occasions.
So, because household norms are no longer operable, there is little incentive not to overeat or make better choices; further, there is little ability for the weight manager to control the composition of the food or the portion sizes. When consumers make “healthier’ choices when dining out, the decision is based as much on
perceived quality differences in the menu offering as on any weight management distinctions (e.g., fats, carbs, calories).
An earlier Hartman Group study (
Healthy Eating Trends, 2009), documented that the importance of eating healthy away from home depends on attitudes toward healthy eating in general—and only 23% of (adult) consumers said their households try to eat healthy all the time.
Among all respondents in the quantitative portion of Healthy Eating, 31% said healthy eating was either never a priority or cited, “Eating out can be healthy, but it’s hardly the main determinant of what I order.” Only 17% chose “Eating healthy is not about when or where, I always choose the healthiest options when eating out.” (Figure 1).
Comment »
Print »
E-mail »
Subscribe »
digg
del.icio.us
facebook
Linked in
newsvine
reddit
twitter
friendfeed
StumbleUpon
