Menu Development | By Marc Halperin
We live in an age of breakfast bars and liquid lunches, an era when yogurt can be extruded straight into your mouth from a slim plastic sleeve, a time when crackers, cookies, pizza, chips, cereal, fruit, lunch meats and, any number of other comestibles can be purchased in handy, individual-size portions ideal for eating en route to somewhere else.
Because Americans favor food that’s fast, fun, filling, and fits in their fists, most quick-serve concepts have built businesses around that quintessential handheld meal: the sandwich. But as a harried culture continues searching for ways to shave a few minutes off the average meal occasion without compromising on quality or taste, chains will want to take a closer look at techniques that capture a greater share of dollars dedicated to dining on the fly.
Neat to Heat
Though I’m not aware of any hard data that supports this assertion, I’m willing to bet that somewhere between 99.9 and 100 percent of fast-food meals are eaten within 15 minutes of purchase. The number of consumers who regularly head for the drive-thru intent on grabbing a burger, sandwich, or bucket of chicken they can stick in the refrigerator and reheat later probably hovers somewhere near zero. Yet those same customers might do just that with food purchased from the grocery store. To wit: rotisserie chicken. So why don’t quick-service chains market their meals in the same manner, as food intended to be eaten at an occasion other than here and now.
Starbucks recognized that the same on-the-go customers who were racing through its doors at 8 a.m. for a latte and a muffin were likely to be just as starved for time during the lunch hour— thus the chain’s effort to expand its more traditional breakfast café menu to include upscale, deli-style takeout sandwiches for consumption later in the day. Similarly, years ago, the Cheeseboard Collective in Berkeley, California realized it could further capitalize on the appeal of its hot, fresh-baked pies by offering a line of partially baked pizzas customers could bring home and finish cooking in their own ovens. The idea took off, and now, of course, many supermarkets offer similar options, including half-baked baguettes that can be heated into piping-hot loaves in a matter of minutes. The rest of the quick-service field might want to take a page from the Starbucks/Cheeseboard playbook and consider fashioning a series of takeout options that would extend their brands’ reach into consumers’ homes. The fact that some chains, including White Castle and California Pizza Kitchen, have made inroads into the supermarket frozen foods aisle suggests that consumers are hungering for a taste of their favorite quick-serve experiences at home; offering high-quality take-away fare suitable for reheating might be a fresher way to meet that demand.