Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Mike Hohnen

Simple is hard

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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.”

More wisdom from Jim Sullivan

McDonald's eyes premium coffee market

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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.”

USA Today

Hardee's burger is all about thumbing your nose at the food police

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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.

La Times for full article

French Dieting, instead of low carb?

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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.

reveries, by Tim Maners

Surprised?

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By Harry Balzer, NPD Vice President

The element of surprise cannot be under-rated in love or in war or in the food industry. In the food business, as in other industries, examining the areas that run counter to popular perception and raise eyebrows can be the first step in identifying business opportunities and existing niches that have not been fully mined for potential riches.

Based on the latest findings at NPD Foodworld, following are my top Food Surprises of 2004: NPD Food World

After helping you put it on, now they want to help you take it off.

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Yum Brands Inc. which owns the Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s and A&W chains is offering free, four-week memberships at Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp. clubs in January to people bent on indulging without bulging.

The timing of the promotion coincides with the ritual of making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight. It also comes as many fast-food chains work to blunt the negative publicity received in recent years from obesity-related lawsuits and the documentary film “Super Size Me.”

One health expert viewed the health club offer as a smart public relations stunt.

“The fast-food industry in most people’s minds is equated with being fat and sick,” said John McDougall, an advisory board member with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “What this does is provide good PR because it associates these restaurants with exercise and the concept of good health.”

From L.A. Times

World cooling to U.S. brands?

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New polling data suggests anger at U.S. foreign policy may be translating into avoidance of U.S. brands in some countries. “The world’s love affair with America isn’t exactly over, but it has stopped being a blind and unquestioning kind of love,” said Simon Anholt, author of “Brand America.” Business for Diplomatic Action, a coalition of public relations and advertising executives, has recruited companies such as PepsiCo and McDonald’s to join an effort to help improve America’s image abroad.

Financial Times London

reveries – cool news of the day

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From Tim Manners

Immaculate Sushi. Lunch or dinner there will cost you $350, and you don’t get to pick what to eat.

A meal at the 26-seat Masa is a three-hour affair, with all items selected and served in a “sequence … and rhythm” determined by Masayoshi Takayama, its chef and owner. The chef:customer ratio typically is 1:2. If you are seated “in one of the 10 seats at the hinkoki wood bar, sanded so frequently that you catch its faint scent,” you watch your sushi being prepared by black-robed, short-haired (or shaven headed) chefs “from just inches away.” As Frank Bruni relays it: “A chef makes your sushi a piece at a time, reaching for a pristine slab of fluke or Spanish mackerel and using a bone-handled knife to carve a sliver. He presses wasabi or maybe shiso flakes onto a bed of warm rice, lays the fish atop it and then anoints this jewel with soy sauce, yuzu or sudachi, a limelike Japanese fruit.” The effect is “an immediacy and intimacy unlike anything at more conventional restaurants or for that matter at other upscale sushi bars …”

[Read more…] about reveries – cool news of the day