Signs that the public’s enthusiasm for low-carb dieting is waning are everywhere. According to U.S. studies, up to 10 per cent of Americans have tried low-carb diets in recent years, but almost half have given them up. Books like Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution and The Zone, which monopolized bestseller lists for much of 2003, have quietly bowed out of the Top 10. And sales of the thousands of newly launched low-carb food products have stalled. It appears that for a growing number of people, the diets heralded by celebrities as the key to boundless energy and a bodacious bod have proven to be a massive disappointment.Mcleans
Archive for January, 2005
Simple is hard
You sell service. At the heart of any successful restaurant operation is the soul of service. Customers walk in, drive through or pull up to our businesses dozens or hundreds of times a day. If those people are exactly the same when they leave, that means we’ve failed. “Product expertise can be duplicated,” says author Martha Rogers, “so any competitive advantage based on products eventually will go away. But customer expertise is competitively defendable, unique and permanent.”
McDonald's eyes premium coffee market
McDonald’s (MCD) fixed the food. Now it has an effort quietly brewing to bring another menu item up a notch: the coffee.
No announcement has been made. But the fast-food giant says it expects to test, then roll out, “premium coffee” to its 13,000 U.S. stores later this year or in 2006. Premium coffee uses higher-quality beans – and is pricier.
“Coffee has increased in popularity beyond a breakfast beverage,” spokesman William Whitman says. “We see an opportunity to bring our customers a better-tasting product at a value price.”
Hardee's burger is all about thumbing your nose at the food police
The hottest new hamburger at Hardee’s is an unabashedly unhealthy mountain of meat called the Monster Thickburger.
Loaded with two 1/3-pound Angus beef patties, four strips of bacon and three slices of cheese, slathered with a generous swab of mayonnaise and encased in a buttered bun, it’s not exactly a celebration of calorie counting.
Who’s counting? When the 1,420-calorie, 107-fat-gram behemoth was unleashed, people gobbled it up.
“Sales results for this politically incorrect burger have been encouraging,” Andrew Puzder, chief executive officer of Hardee’s parent CKE Restaurants Inc., told Wall Street analysts after the big burger’s debut in mid-November.
The Monster has been singled out – the Center for Science in the Public Interest called it the “fast-food equivalent of a snuff film” – but the $5.49, 4-inch-tall sandwich is just the newest heart-clogging trend in the fast-food industry.
Big is nothing new at fast-food restaurants. McDonald’s, for instance, famously offered Super Size fries and drinks until it overhauled its menu to promote a “balanced lifestyle” last March.
The latest trend isn’t just about size or value. It’s about thumbing your nose at the food police.
French Dieting, instead of low carb?
January 10, 2005
French Dieting. Now that the low-carb craze seems to be fading, could a diet modeled on the way French women eat be the next big American weight-loss trend? Could be, if “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” hailed by its author as “the ultimate non-diet book” catches on, reports Nanci Hellmich in USA Today. According to Mireille Guiliano, the book’s author, the reason so many French women “are slender and graceful” is that they “eat with all five senses … allowing less to seem like more.” No, it’s not because they smoke. It’s because, as Mireille explains, when she goes out with friends for a sandwich, in Paris, “we sit down, take our time, look at the sandwich, admire the bread or the butter on it. We eat slowly. We chew well. We stop between bites.” And “we” don’t get fat.