Trends

USA Today

Not with lettuce and tomato, but with a fried egg and ketchup. Carl’s Jr., the fast-food chain that loves to thumb its nose at political correctness, this week will unveil the burger.

The national trend toward lunch at breakfast is clear. About 12.5% of fast-food diners ordered burgers for breakfast in 2004, compared with 7.5% in 2003, reports Sandelman & Associates, a restaurant consulting firm. In trend-setting Southern California, 17.6% of fast-food breakfast eaters got burgers this year.

Starbucks is getting together with XM Satellite Radio to create the Starbucks Hear Music channel. The Starbucks channel will debut this fall and by 2005 it is anticipated that Starbucks customers will be able to listen to the channel in more than 4,000 locations nationwide.

“If it works, it’s obsolete?

Marshall McLuhan

Yum Brands Inc., operator of the Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC restaurant chains, plans to open 300 restaurants a year in China, its fastest-growing market.

Yum is focusing its expansion in Asia. China will overtake the U.S. in sales for Yum at some point, Chief Executive David Novak said.

https://www.qsrmagazine.com/issue/69/milk.phtml
Today milk is the second most popular beverage in America and number one in homes, according to Milk PEP. Indeed, it seems milk is everywhere, featured on television and in magazines and filling the shelves in convenience stores and supermarkets. There are even single-serve milk vending machines. But there is one place where milk remains conspicuously absent : restaurants.

Sure, there have been a few isolated incidents, but for the most part, milk’s place in foodservice has been in crates in the back of the kitchen. Kurt Graetzer, CEO of Milk PEP, says that while milk is present in 97 percent of restaurants, it only represents a 5 percent volume share of all beverage sales. But how could this be, one might ask.

Paris exceeds Starbucks’ expectations
Starbucks brewed its first cup of coffee in Paris in January, and by month’s end will have nine stores up and running in the French capital. “We have a solid and sound basis that operates well,” says Starbucks’ general manager of the Paris operations. The coffeehouse chain has no plans to expand into other areas of France at this time.

Quoted from Businessblog https://www.manyworlds.com/1/businessblog/2004/11/learning-for-innovation.html

Self Service – A quick poll of the audience, about 1500 people, revealed that most of us used a check-in kiosk at the airline of our choice to get to NYC. A year ago this was unthinkable. This is a great example of why the ‘self-service’ trend is so hot and will continue to be the preferred way of people to interact with systems.

At first you’d think the airline personnel who used to staff the check in desks would be highly threatened by this, but they have now realized that they are freed up to really add value to situations where people really need help, not just the transactional. And now kiosks are moving up the value chain, mooving from the transactional to the ‘revenue generating’ as they have new functions to buy drink coupons and ‘auction’ first class seats depending on demand. Imagine this kind of self-service environment in a much broader way inside organizations, its a great way to help them learn and develop, as well as freeing up ‘real’ people to focus on the most important things.

Health-conscious and high-tech-loving consumers are grabbing more powerful snacks. A new “superfood” industry is merging that catcrs to customers’ desires for convenient, highly efficient foods that have the best formula of calories, caffeine, sodium, vitamins, and minerals to meet their diet and lifestyle needs.

-Futurist Update, Apr 2004