Conservation of Mass (continued)

So, is Conservation of Mass evident across the entire FFU? Yes, but it's not as easily demonstrated outside of TB. And it's less of a hard and fast rule than it used to be.

There has been a definite trend over the past couple of years which bucks the Conservation of Mass theory. It doesn't render it invalid, but it does stretch the definition a bit. I believe that by and large the entire FFU is moving upmarket - kind of like what Volkswagen is doing in the automotive world. For decades, VW was known as a producer of cheap transportation (Beetle, Rabbit, older Jettas, even the defunct Dasher). The word 'luxury' did not belong in sentence with the word 'Volkswagen'. Sit in an '85 Rabbit and you'll see what I mean. But beginning in the late 90's with the introduction of the Passat, the company has made a concerted effort to draw buyers looking for something beyond basic transport. The entire model line has been revamped over the past decade, culminating in the production of two definite BMW/MB level monsters - the Touraeg and the Phaeton. They ain't your father's VWs. Along with the move towards slightly more highfalutin' vehicles, prices have risen as well. VWs still represent a great value - I don't think there's another vehicle which matches the Passat in terms of overall features and build quality - but the improvements carry a cost. And will VW actually be able to sell $30k-$40k vehicles when for decades they've been known for their entry-level automobiles? That remains to be seen.

Where am I going with the VW analogy? The FFU hasn't undergone the same kind of complete transformation, but it's clearly moving in the same direction. Compare McD's 80's-era menu with their menu today. Actually, that's an exercise I'd love to do in detail, but pending a source of old menu information, it's going to be tough. But what I'd bet you'd find is this: ignoring inflation, core items (cheeseburgers, Big Macs, fries, apple pies, etcetera - the classic stuff) have remained at more or less the same price points. But newer introductions - fancy-shmancy salads, Big & Tastys, Chicken McGrills - carry a higher price tag than anything you'd find on the menu back in the old days (again, adjusted for inflation). McD's is probably the worst example of the phenomenon, given that much of their menu is probably locked in for eternity - but the trend is there. BK is a better example, since outside of the Whopper and basic burgers, there isn't much an 80's era FF patron would recognize on today's menu. I'll bet that patron would suffer sticker shock.

As with VW selling $40k vehicles, I think the average consumer is a bit leery of buying $5 shrimp salads at Burger King. To what extent will this move upmarket actually prove profitable? Outlook: unclear. We'll just have to see how long shrimp's on the menu.

This all leads me to Conservation of Mass Corollary #1: It's easier to justify a price increase if the product has some marketable improvement. Cases in point: McD's "triple-thick" shakes, or Wendy's 'new' line of chicken sandwiches. They both probably cost a bit more to produce than what they replace, but they also carry a higher price tag - and I'm certain the FF establishments aren't losing money on the deal.

Anything else we need to know about the First Law of Fastfoodynamics? The next chapter will tie up the loose ends.

The Laws of Fastfoodynamics

So by now it's become abundantly clear that I have an unhealthy (mentally & physically) obsession with the Fast Food Universe (the FFU). The food, the culture, the marketing - it all intrigues me. I do not deny this. I am not particularly proud of it, nor am I shamed by it. It is what it is.

The obsession has been with me for a long time. How long, I'm not entirely sure. At the very least, it goes back to sophomore year in college. 1994 marked the establishment of the first Taco Bell in Ithaca, New York. It was, in fact, the first TB I ever had the pleasure of frequenting, and it will always have a special place in my heart. It was there that I tasted my first Meximelt. There, I sampled the Texas Taco, ancestor of the present-day gordita. There, I consumed my first and only TB meal in full black tie regalia (another story for another time).

I think that TB opened the floodgates to what had been, up to that point, only a mild interest in the FFU. A switch was flipped. Why, I cannot say. A decade has passed since my indoctrination, and over the years I've formulated a few overriding principles which I call the Laws of Fastfoodynamics. This is not brain surgery; it's just a set of instructive themes I've noticed time and time again. Though I have discussed these maxims with friends, I have never committed them to paper, or to blog form, so please bear with me as I sort out them out, one by one.

We begin with The First Law of Fastfoodynamics - Conservation of Mass. I began to formulate this theorem as a response to an observation many Taco Bell aficionados have picked up on: Nearly everything on the menu is a variation on the same basic set of twelve core ingredients. Those ingredients are flour tortillas, taco shells, gordita shells, beans, meat, chicken, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, cheese, guac, and red sauce. Given moderate amounts of those dozen ingredients, there are few Border specialties one cannot construct. Soft taco? Check. Hard taco? Check. Bean burrito? Seven layer? Double decker? Meximelt? Check, check, check, check. There are, of course, exceptions - the Taco Salad requires a special bowl-shaped shell, the Baja Gordita has its own special sauce, and of course the cinnamon twists are a different beast entirely. But the core ingredients are what TB is built on.

And it makes a whole lot of sense, economically speaking. The fewer individual items a store has to stock and prepare, the more money they'll save. For the most part, the introduction of a new, limited-time specialty - for example, the four-alarm double decker, or the three-cheese melt - requires just a single new ingredient (respectively, a spicy cheese sauce and a three-bean medley). In some cases - i.e. the current Cheesy Gordita Crunch - there aren't any new ingredients. A few of the core dozen are just combined in a new way. It's elegant and creative. I've always imagined a group of TB executives sitting in front of a board covered with a bunch of magnets, each of which is emblazoned with the title of a core ingredient. The execs take turns moving the magnets around, pausing to imagine what an item composed of that set of ingredients would taste like. Better yet, perhaps a TB programmer has written a piece of software that spits out combinations of ingredients, which are then reviewed by a team of taste testers. The software would follow certain rules, such that invalid combos wouldn't be generated (i.e. BEANS + CHEESE + RED SAUCE + GUAC - that's soup - or TORTILLA + TACO SHELL + GORDITA SHELL - that would be, err, a little bland). BorderSoft 2000. TacoWare 1.0. TBWorks 2.1.1. I could go on.

Anyway, this phenomenon is an illustration of The First Law of Fastfoodynamics. To a certain extent, every fast food chain resists the introduction of new ingredients - UNLESS that ingredient will be used in multiple items across that chain's product line. This maxim even extends to the equipment the restaurant uses to prepare their specialties. Case in point: TB's "grilling" machine. This approximately two-foot-square metal device, which looks like an industrial George Foreman Grill except with flat cooking surfaces (and no drainage to "knock out the fat"), was originally introduced along with the Grilled Stuft Burrito. As anyone who's partaken in that fine delicacy knows, the GSB is basically a fat burrito (by TB standards) which spends a minute or so in the griller, thus browning both sides of the item and melting the cheese inside. The result is far more satisfying than your average ungrilled burrito, even though the results have more of a grilled cheese (i.e. pan-fried) vibe than something off the old Weber. Anyway, at the time of the GSB's introduction, the griller was used solely in support of these burritos. I thought that odd; wasn't it awfully expensive to install a whole new piece of equipment in EVERY TB restaurant worldwide, just so they could grill a few burritos? Sure enough, within a couple of months, another reason for the griller's purpose in life came to light: the quesadilla. Yes, the quesadilla, long a staple of quasi-fast-food establishments like Friday's and Chili's, long noticeably absent from TB's repertoire. THIS was a new item - sure, it was just a different combination of a few of the core twelve, but the new cooking method was what made it special. And I'm quite sure quesadilla sales have paid for the grillers many times over. A worthy invesment indeed.

Does Conservation of Mass apply to the other chains? Or is it exclusively a TB phenomenon? Stay tuned for the answer to that, and more, in the next installment of The Laws of Fastfoodynamics.

Sack o' Shrimp

Shrimp Caesar Salad - Technically, BK has introduced four new salads: Chicken or Shrimp Garden (lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, onions, etcetera), and Chicken or Shrimp Caesar (lettuce, tomatoes, Parmesan, croutons). They come in a big bowl, akin to McD's salads, and as in that case, they're about ten thousand times better than the shitty salads they replace. An aside: a salad you can shake? What the hell was McD's thinking? Utter crap. My distaste for the Salad Shakers requires its own blog entry, so I'll save the full diatribe for another day. Back to BK. The salads are served as follows: base bowl of greens (either Garden or Caesar), packet of croutons, packet of dressing (besides the creamy caesar, there are a couple of vinagrettes - I'll have to get the full 411 on the other flavors, but I think sweet onion was one of them), and sack of meat. That's right. You get a small, blazing hot bag of either "fire-grilled" (er, more specifically, flame-broiled, refrigerated, and then nuked before serving) chicken or shrimp. Can't tell you what's in that sack of chicken, but I'm guessing it's a variation on the new Chicken Whopper patty. Probably pretty solid stuff. I indulged in the shrimp, mostly because I couldn't turn down the opportunity to consume fast food shrimp. What does it say about me that I was actually excited to see a shrimp product on the menu, but was then almost immediately filled with fear and regret upon actually placing my order? As it turned out, my apprehension was unfounded. The shrimps were shrimpy - on the small side, as one might expect, but not tiny - and extremely nonthreatening. Actually, they were rather good. I was sure they'd be overcooked and rubbery; how could they not be, having emerged from a bag hotter than the surface of the sun? But to my surprise, they were prepared just about the way they should have been. They were doused in some kind of thin orange-colored liquid - I'm guessing a combo of water, shrimp-generated 'juice', a little oil, some seasoning (maybe paprika, definitely salt).

The searing heat of the meat sack brought one thought to mind: the late, great McDLT. Keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool. Unfortunately for McD's, nobody really cared that much about the gimmick. Fact is, if the lettuce on your burger is 75 degrees instead of 65, you probably won't even notice. However, a salad is a different animal. Imagine dumping a pile of white-hot shrimp on reasonably fresh greens, and then serving that salad to a customer an hour later. Wouldn't be pretty. The shrimp would be cold, the greens warm and limp. If BK was set on serving the shrimp hot, then the sack method is actually quite ingenious. The whole situation begs the question, why not just serve the shrimp cold? Wendy's (though they don't yet serve any shrimp products) has served cold chicken in their salads for years. And cold shrimp is far from unpalatable (see cocktail, shrimp, for more information). From the standpoint of overall expense (materials, labor, etcetera), an all-cold salad would seem to be cheaper (salads could be fully assembled in bulk, and the nuking step eliminated). I'm certain a lot of research went into this decision, and I can only assume:

- There's some downside to storing cold shrimp - maybe it deteriorates rapidly.
- Market research shows that customers prefer hot shrimp to cold.

I wonder what market research said about the willingness of the average BK customer to eat fast food shrimp. I might guess the results would be pessimistic enough to quash the project, but clearly I'm underestimating the strength of Joe Consumer's stomach (or overestimating his fear of the unknown).

BK tries to break the mold

Angus burgers? Shrimp salads? What the hell is going on over at your friendly neighborhood Burger King? For a couple of years, fast food chains have made a concerted effort to introduce higher quality foods - such as McD's Big & Tasty (featuring real, live lettuce and tomato, items not seen since the demise of the McDLT), Wendy's new line of salads, BK's own Chicken Whopper (replacing the horrible denuded McNugget-like Broiler). Well, the King has upped the ante. Let's look at the two major new menu additions one by one.

First up: the Angus Burger. Two varieties - one with grilled onions and some kind of BBQ sauce, the other with bacon and cheddar. Both sandwiches feature a 1/3-lb seasoned patty (ostensibly prepared with spices and steak sauce), a kaiser-like roll, lettuce and tomato. I sampled the plainer burger last week. At $3.79, she ain't cheap, but you get what you pay for - this product is clearly superior to the good old Whopper. I wouldn't confuse it for a steakhouse-style monster burger, but it's damn close, as close as one could hope to find at a fast food establishment. At least, within my admittedly limited experience (McD's, Wendy's, In & Out, Roy's, Hardee's). Perhaps Jack in the Box or Carl's Jr has something like this, but certainly none of the major East Coast players do. It will be interesting to see if the Angus burger is a success. Whoppers can be had for a fraction of the price - so it looks like the marketing gurus at BK are shooting for a different kind of consumer. From what I've read, the tag 'Angus' in and of itself doesn't mean anything - 'Black Angus' means something, though not as much as the average cow-eater believes. The name has an air of quality about it, suggesting the meat is of a higher grade. Whether that's true or not, BK wants to attract customers who normally sneer at the prospect of consuming fast food burgers. I have yet to see the ad campaign (I don't think they've rolled out the product nationally yet - maybe they're testing markets at the moment), but suffice it to say I'm curious what kind of tack the commercials will take.

It's alive!

Rise, old blog! Rise from the ashes of your creator's criminally brief attention span! So much to say, so little, err, moxie...