Entries from February 2007
After a record first quarter, Jack in the Box has announced plans to expand and to “re-image” their present stores.
The round-headed guy is opening 40 to 45 new restaurants in 2007 and 80 to 90 new Qdoba restaurants. Presently, there are 2088 Jack in the Box restaurants and 344 Qdoba restaurants.
The company will also be spending more than $160 million on kitchen enhancements and a complete redesign of the dining rooms, including new floors, a mix of seating styles, decorative pendant lighting and graphics and wall collages. They will also be changing the music, uniforms, menu boards and packaging, as well as landscaping and other exterior enhancements.
The company is starting with 150 to 200 stores this year and expects to complete the rest of the boxes in five years.
Categories: Trends
In Britain , Domino’s Pizza is shaving off a couple more minutes in their delivery times by successfully encouraging customers to order online. Now, one in eight pizzas is ordered from its website, which helped boost profits as well.
In the past year, Domino’s “e-pizza” sales rose 43.8 percent. Though they launched the service in 1999, improvements in the website account for the recent increase. Before, local deals weren’t allowed online and now they are.
Categories: Trends
The Department of Agriculture announced yesterday that it is launching a new “risk-based” inspection system of meat, poultry and egg processing plants.
The system will launch in April with about 250 plants and add 150 more by the end of the year, according to Richard Raymond, the undersecretary for food safety. It is designed to concentrate inspections in plants with poorer records, or those that pose a greater risk of food-borne illnesses. It would also cut the number of inspections in plants with better records.
This new system allows the Inspection Service branch of the USDA to focus more on prevention, according to Raymond, by allocating more (of its all too limited) inspection resources where they are needed most.
Categories: Food Safety · USDA · Uncategorized
The National Restaurant Association is on record opposing any form of federally mandated wage increases. However, since it is clearly high on Congress’s agenda, the NRA has come down on the side of the Senate’s version, which offers substantially more help to small businesses than the House version.
The House version provides $1.3 billion in tax breaks to small businesses to offset the minimum-wage increase. The Senate version includes $8.3 billion in tax offsets.
The NRA points out that after the federal wage hike in 1996, the restaurant industry lost more than 146,000 jobs, and operators postponed plans to hire an additional 106,000 employees.
The Senate version allows small businesses to deduct $112,000 in new investments and would shorten the depreciation period for improvements to retail properties. It would also extend for five years the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which rewards small businesses for hiring low-income and disadvantaged workers.
The House and Senate must now reconcile their two versions. Meanwhile, President Bush has said he won’t sign a minimum-wage increase that doesn’t include tax breaks for small businesses and restaurants.
Categories: Legislation
Last October, surveys were taken of restaurant owners regarding the proposed minimum-wage increase from $5.15 to $7.25.
Increase prices? Ninety-eight percent of quick-service operators said they would increase menu prices, compared to about three out of four family-dining and casual-dining operators.
Reduce work force? About half of restaurant operators said they would reduce the number of employee hours worked. Approximately one out of four said they would postpone plans for new hiring if the federal minimum wage rose to $7.25 over the course of 30 months.
Effect on employees? Approximately three out of 10 restaurant operators said they would cut employee benefits.
Categories: Uncategorized
Restaurants will be increasingly replacing unskilled workers with devices such as self-service order pads, experts predict.
A company out of Van Nuys, California, started by Nolan Bushnell, who founded Chuck E. Cheese, will be providing restaurant owners with touchscreen ordering pads at customer tables. After ordering, the pads will turn into video-game consoles for the kids.
According to Calvin Watkins, a competitor of Bushnell’s company, the minimum-wage increase will push operators to install touchscreen technology sooner. He calculates that a forty-table restaurant requires ten servers per shift without touchscreens. With touchscreens, it is reduced to four servers per shift.
Watkins believes that adoption of self-service technology isn’t a matter of if, but when.
Categories: Trends
Problem: milk consumption is decreasing in parts of Japan, leaving nearly 900 tons of the stuff in the island of Hokkaido alone.
Solution: Hokkaido resident and liquor store owner Chitoshi Nakahara developed a method to use the milk to brew beer. It looks and smells like beer and, except for a milky aroma, you would never know its origin.
It took Nakahara about six months to develop the product, which he calls “Bilk,” a combination of beer and milk. It seems he has bilked everyone in Hokkaido. He has sold out completely.
Categories: Trends
CONGRESS
In the wake of the General Accounting Office’s report criticizing the state of food-safety inspection in this country, a Congressional appropriations subcommittee met for the first time in six years.
The two criticisms come down to too little money and too inefficient. Though the FDA regulates 80 percent of the food grown or imported, it only gets a quarter of the 1.7 billion spent on food safety. The Agriculture Department gets most of it, even though it only regulates 20 percent of the food.
The GAO pointed out that there have been cases where an inspector from the USDA and an inspector from the FDA have been in the same food plant at the same time.
The Consumer Federation of America estimates the FDA needs $115 million more, not the $10.6 million more that Bush is calling for.
The United Fresh Produce Association repeated its statement welcoming any changes in oversight that the federal government wishes to make. The American Meat Institute spokesman stated that the rates of food-borne illnesses from meat has decreased in recent years.
(more…)
Categories: FDA · Legislation
The Govt. Accounting Office, GAO, this week added food safety to its list of critically flawed federal programs (wonder how long that list is), blaming the problem on “splintered jurisdiction” among 15 agencies.
President Bush has added $11 million for food safety in his new budget, mostly aimed at reducing the risk from produce outbreaks. Critics, though, contend that such a low amount won’t offset all of the recent cutbacks in the FDA’s inspection staff.
According to the Center for Disease Control, each year about 76 million people in the U.S. contract a food-borne illness. Though the vast majority get better on their own, about 325,000 are hospitalized each year and 5,000 die.
Categories: Food Borne Illness · Food Safety · Legislation
Apparently, it’s not something to be taken lightly (but we’ll try all the same). It may be named for a city in Germany, but to those who know better and care more, the hamburger is every bit as American as its skinny friend, the hot dog.
So, when a bunch of rabble-rousing braggadocio Texas lawmakers decided to make it official that it was a Texan who invented the hamburger (at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair), quite a few hamburger connoisseurs (it’s not as much an oxymoron as you may think) cried, “Bull!”
Historian, online food editor for New York magazine and author of the upcoming “Hamburgers: a Cultural History,” Josh Ozersky is leading the way in debunking the Lone Star claim.
Ozersky has debunked less obnoxious but still fallacious claims from Louis Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut, the Bilbys of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the good citizens of Seymour, Wisconsin (maybe they’d settle for inventing the cheese(head)burger). But he went overboard on Texas, researching the participants of the St. Louis World’s Fair to show that the Texas hero, Fletch Davis, was never there. Also, Ozersky maintains, there is absolutely no evidence for Texas’s claim at all. (Though, as a practiced journalist, Ozersky surely knows that Texans rarely let such a paltry thing as fact get in the way of their claims of greatness.)
Wichita, Kansas, is actually the birthplace of the burger, states Ozersky. In 1915 or so, a grill cook named Walter Anderson and his pal, Billy Ingram, started serving hamburgers. They were so popular, the two started their own burger restaurant in 1921. They called it White Castle . Ozersky gives the knights of the White Castle the honors for inventing the modern fast-food business as well.
Categories: Uncategorized
