Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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Change on the menu as Gen Y hits eateries

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Restaurant menus will undergo profound and rapid change over the next two decades, reflecting the convergence of two significant factors. One is the power exerted by huge Generation Y as its members become autonomous restaurant-goers.

The other is the demands of diners of all ages who want menus to cater to their health, nutrition and weight concerns.

That’s the meta-message of Flavor & the Menu, an industry quarterly that tracks trends and makes predictions for the future of restaurateuring.

Miami Herald

End of Low carb?

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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

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