Real Fries With That
The news this week is that Burger King is abandoning a supposedly semi-healthy french fry, which has less fat and less oil.
They had a snappy name: satisfries. The customers knew better. They were yuckfries.
Three times in the past, Burger King has attempted to substitute a new recipe for french fries, and every time most customers refused to order a second box.
Do customers think french fries are good for them? Not if they have IQ's above 90.
One report said that satisfries were a corporate response to falling sales of french fries. It blamed consumer awareness on the decline of sales.
Do the statistics confirm this? No. French fries declined in sales from 2006 to 2011 by 1.9% -- statistically random. What fell was burger sales: by 28%.
Burger King's problem is half of its name: Burger. It is not its french fry sales.
Burger King tried to beef up its image (sorry) with "healthy" french fries. Nobody bought either the concept or the fries. This is one more example of desperate moves to change a corporate image. The problem is not the image. It is the change in customers' tastes.
I have not eaten french fries for decades. I was never a big fan of them, but I finally figured out that they are mostly an excuse for eating catsup, in much the same way that artichokes are an excuse for eating mayonnaise. But if people want to eat them, that is their business, and the fast food industry's business.
Problem: french fries, for the food police, are the closest things to cigarettes on any menu.
CHARLIE BROWN AND THE FOOD POLICE
I cannot honestly say that I remember very many cartoon strips from Peanuts. There were over 17,000 of them. I started reading the cartoon strip earlier than almost anybody else you've ever met, back in 1951, when it ran in the Denver Post. Back then, Snoopy ran around on all four legs. He was not a budding novelist. There were no dark and stormy nights.
I remember one four-panel strip very clearly. I don't remember what the lead up was in the first three panels, but it all involved fantasizing by Charlie Brown. The fourth panel was the kicker: "Someday, they'll find out that french fries are good for you." He knew better. But we can always dream.
French fries have always been where the profit is. McDonald's was built on french fries. Take french fries off the menu, and you take down fast food restaurants.
When Ray Kroc was planning to open his very first McDonald's franchise in Chicago, he knew that the whole franchise depended on the french fries.
On French fries, Kroc writes: "Now, to most people, a french-fried potato is a pretty uninspiring object. It's fodder, something to kill time between chewing bites of hamburger and swallows of milk shake. That's your ordinary french fry. The McDonald's french fry was in an entirely different league. They lavished attention on it. I didn't know it then, but one day I would, too. The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously."Kroc writes: "One of my suppliers told me 'Ray, you know you aren't in the hamburger business at all. You're in the french-fry business. I don't know how the livin' hell you do it, but you've got the best french fries in town, and that's what's selling folks on your place.'" Looking back, Kroc writes "The quality of our french fries was a large part of McDonald's success."
This is why the following story is crucial in the history of fast food restaurants.
After getting the go-ahead from the McDonald brothers to roll McDonald's out nationally, Kroc got to work on setting up the second store. Getting the french fries right proved challenging. "I had explained to Ed MacLuckie with great pride the McDonald's secret for making french fries. I showed him how to peel potatoes, leaving just a bit of the skin to add flavor. Then I cut them into shoestring strips and dumped them into a sink of cold water. The ritual captivated me. I rolled my sleeves to the elbows and, after scrubbing down in proper hospital fashion, I immersed my arms and gently stirred the potatoes until the water went white with starch. Then I rinsed them thoroughly and put them into a basket for deep frying in fresh oil. The result was a perfectly fine looking, golden brown potato that snuggled up against the palate with a taste like… well, like mush. I was aghast. What the hell could I have done wrong? I went back over the steps in my mind, trying to determine whether I had left something out. I hadn't. I had memorized the procedure when I watched the McDonald's operation in San Bernadino, and I had done it exactly the same way. I went through the whole thing once more. The result was the same -- bland, mushy french fries. They were as good, actually, as the french fries you could buy at other places. But that was not what I wanted. They were not the wonderful french fries I had discovered in California. I got on the telephone and talked it over with the McDonald brothers. They couldn't figure it out either."This was a tremendously frustrating situation. My whole idea depended on carrying out the McDonald's standard of taste and quality in hundreds of stores, and here I couldn't even do it in the first one!"
In solving the problem, Kroc learned something about how potatoes improve in flavor as they dry out after being dug. "I contacted the experts at the Potato and Onion Association, and explained my problem to them. They were baffled too, at first, but then one of their laboratory men asked me to describe the McDonald's San Bernadino procedure step-by-step from the time they bought the potatoes from the grower up in Idaho. I detailed it all, and when I got to the point where they stored them in the shaded chicken-wire bins, he said 'That's it!' He went on to explain that when potatoes are dug, they are mostly water. They improve in taste as they dry out and the sugars change to starch. The McDonald brothers had, without knowing it, a natural curing process in their open bins, which allowed the desert breeze to blow over the potatoes. With the help of the potato people, I devised a curing system of my own."
If the food police ever pressure fast food restaurants to cut back on the sale of french fries, it will be because they do not trust the judgment of customers. This, of course, is exactly what they believe. This is their reason for existence. "We know better than you do what's good for you. Also, we have guns and badges. So, if you know what's good for you, you will do what we say."
CONCLUSION
If customers want unhealthy fries, fast food restaurants will sell them what they want. The health police should go away. But government money is behind the food police. There is a bureaucratic empire to defend. They will not go away.
The solution is for us to make our own dietary decisions. Get the federal government out of our menus.