Scroll back to a short course on marketing I once took, courtesy of the Public Relations Society of America. Marketing, we learned, is not to be confused with advertising. It has several interlocking facets: target market, product, distribution, advertising and price. All have to fit in a seamless whole to create profit on a product.
Hedonics, availability, consistency, price. Those are four things that mass food marketers look to "optimize," David Kessler informs us in The End of Overeating, Ch. 24. Hedonics and consistency relate to the product. Availability roughly corresponds to distribution. Price is price. Advertising is not mentioned by Kessler in this chapter. Target market -- that would be us. If mass food marketers win out, we may help to make them rich, while they help to make us...fat.
We're continuing a group review of David Kessler's The End of Overeating, started by Edward Spurlock, whose last contribution, on Ch. 23 -- with links to previous installments -- is here.
Follow below the fold to amble round the edges of the business side of mass food marketing. (There will be lots more in Ch. 25 and beyond.)
WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
As Kessler writes, food marketers can "dial in" the right amounts of fat, salt and sugar to make foods "highly palatable," in other words likely to persuade a fair percentage of us to keep eating when we might already be full, to come back and do it again. Total control of the process allows complete consistency in the product.
"Optimizing hedonics" typically includes partial preparation in the factory, even for foods that will be served in a restaurant or at home.
IQF, or "individually quick-frozen foods" in small discrete pieces are easier to use in individual servings. These -- as regular WHEEbles will have heard before -- are often partially fried, and fried again in the restaurant adding a double dose of fat. Other meats may arrive in the restaurant kitchen as pre-cut, vacuum packaged individual servings.
Add sauces that come straight out of a can, essential oils and artificial flavors that substitutes for real herbs and spices, and you may have restaurants that are really little more than assembly lines with window dressing.
IQF: a quick search reveals a vibrant international marketplace. An online exchange for buyers and sellers of all sorts of frozen foods, including many IQF items. Frozen omelettes. Frozen baked goods:
Our ready-to-heat Pancakes, French Toast and Waffles will equal or exceed the quality you currently serve, while reducing waste, increasing consistency, eliminating labor and decreasing service time! Yes, we have successfully accomplished this for other major chains and will do it for you...
Bread Basket specialties. Are you looking for slightly unique specialty bread your customers will crave? Our fresh baked breads, buns, bread sticks and rolls are frozen with hours of being baked, to ensure freshness when they're in your specialty breadbasket...From the deli and sweet breads to dinner rolls and onions buns, we've got the taste.
Frozen sushi? Yes, from a Japanese company trading out of Dubai.
Is all this freezing horrible? Not in itself, since freezing is a safe way to preserve a lot of perishables. As far as I know, the only vitamin adversely affected is Vitamin E. But as Kessler describes, it's being so universally done more to help "optimize" products, save labor costs and ensure uniformity. And what looks like a decent meal in a moderate priced restaurant, with that nice artisanal bread that we like, may be far less natural and nutritious than it appears.
Another aspect of the mass marketing, one of Kessler's sources tells him, is the dumbing down of food to meet the demands of the least adventurous. This source Kessler describes as a "restuarant designer who helps clients develop novel products and new menu ideas."
I could not be absolutely sure it was the same person, but I am fascinated by the diversity of careers in the food industry that I never heard of before Kessler, and in searching I found either the same individual or another in the same field with the same name:
the restaurant industry expert for CRG Partners, a national restructuring and turnaround firm active in the hospitality industry. In addition, he works with New York City-based restaurant companies and private equity groups. Some of his current projects include development of the Bobby Flay's Burger Palace concept (opening Spring 2008) and new concept development for Todd English Enterprises.
And what is CRG Partners? Merely
a leading middle market turnaround and restructuring firm in the United States
with offices in seven U.S. cities and Austria.
So how did Kessler's expert, and the all others who must have been involved, with all the high-powered marketing ammunition at their disposal, do with Bobby Flay's Burger Palace and Todd English Enterprises?
(And who the heck are Bobby Flay and Todd English anyway? "Celebrity chefs," duh, didn't you know that? No? Me either. Among other accomplishments, Flay reportedly once worked on the floor of the American Stock Exchange.)
Well, here comes the schadenfreude: even with all that marketing expertise and celebrity chefs to boot, in reality they did not necessarily manage to exercise any extraordinary hypnotic power on the American consumer. The marketers are fallible.
You can check out some reviews of Bobby Flay's small chain of burger shops here:
The sweet potato fries, other than being cold, were passable. I could almost see the "RESTAURANT BULK FOOD FROZEN SWEET POTATO FRIES" label stamped on them...We left Bobby’s Burger Palace feeling as though we’d gotten a decent diner meal in a strange setting...If, however, you’re hungry and want to relax I suggest you go for a burger just about anywhere else.
or here:
...the trademarked Crunchburger ($7.50) is served with a heaping topping of potato chips and a double order of American cheese...curiosity got the better of me and I went for the Crunch. The sandwich stays together far better than I anticipated, the bun conforms nicely around the chips on the top and the double order of cheese cements them from the bottom. Of course there will be some shedding of chips but it is minimal. In a recent interview Flay stated "a burger should be about flavor and moistness" unfortunately the patty on the Crunchburger lacked either attribute.
Let's see, in Kessler's terms that would be...fat and salt on fat and salt...or here (which the cache survives):
$5 gets you a small shake, served in a tiny plastic cafeteria-style
tumbler...the vanilla bean milkshake was amongst the worst shakes I’ve ever tried. It was bland, and except for an offensive hint of some unidentified chemical aftertaste, had virtually no flavor whatsoever.
On top of that, according to the Wikipedia entry (I know, I know, but it is footnoted):
On January 15, 2009, a lawsuit was filed against Flay's company, Bold Food LLC, in Manhattan federal court by current and former employees. The lawsuit claims that the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law by practicing improper tip-pooling practices, failure to properly pay overtime, failure to reimburse employees for required expenses, and unlawful retaliation.
The website for the Burger Palace chain was nothing but dead links recently, so maybe the worst has happened...or maybe it's still under construction. To be fair, this discussion contained several positive reviews (as well as a single complaint of food poisoning, worth just as much or as little as any random tendentious online comment, i.e., possibly invented).
As for Todd English, a Boston native whose highly varied restaurant concepts have included
Beso a Spanish restaurant concept partnering with actress Eva Longoria-Parker in Los Angeles; Tuscany, an Italian restaurant at the Mohegan Sun resort in Uncasville, Connecticut; Kingfish Hall, a seafood restaurant at Faneuil Hall Marketplace in downtown Boston; Bonfire, a steakhouse at Boston's Logan Airport and JFK Airport in New York; Todd English, an alternative restaurant aboard the ocean liners of Cunard Line; Blue Zoo, a restaurant at the Dolphin Hotel at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida; and Da Campo Osteria, in the Il Lugano Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, FL, featuring views of the intracoastal waterway, Tuscan cuisine,
he recently got a re-evaluation by Boston magazine:
Twenty years after Olives exploded onto the scene in a hail of garnishes and shaved truffle, its celebrity-chef founder has gone from golden boy to tourist-feeding hack in the eyes of Boston's food establishment. Problem is, we've been judging him by the wrong measures all along.
...What he wanted was to be famous, to build an empire. And by that measure, certainly, things are exactly where he wants them.
..Success spawned opportunity. Soon came the Figs pizza chain, the Olives outposts, more restaurants, the cruise-ship deals. By 2002, English was pursuing everything from frozen pasta to model kitchens made by a Las Vegas design firm.
...several of his restaurants have been flops...He hired some management help, became more selective about his ventures, and cultivated loyal deputies...
He did his time in the kitchen and has the James Beard awards to show for it. Now he's aiming for the (upscale) masses, for the people who'd otherwise be eating at the Cheesecake Factory or McCormick & Schmick's. In this, he feels he is performing a sort of public service.
Absolutely.
Unfortunately, English recently had to give up on three restaurants, but it is said that free publicity due to a cancelled wedding may have helped to improve business since.
Lesson: they may be able to dial up the sugar, fat and salt, but the most sophisticated food marketing methods are still far from foolproof. The Force is actually with us the consumers, and the more educated the better.
Please volunteer for a diary and/or plunk down your opinion in the silly poll. If I've dropped any diaries inadvertantly, let me know!
Scheduled WHEE diaries
November 18
Wed AM - Chico David RN
Wed PM - ???
November 19
Thurs AM - Ed G
Thurs PM - ???
November 20
Fri AM - ???
Fri PM - ???
November 21
Sat AM - ???
Sat PM - Edward Spurlock (Kessler, Ch. 25)
November 22
Sun AM - Turtle Diary Hiatus (going out of town) - need a volunteer!
Sun PM - Wee Mama hosts Holiday Fit Club this Sunday evening
November 23
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
November 24
Tues AM - ???
Tues PM - Clio2 (Kessler, Ch. 26)
cancelled weding