Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,65

I had ordered a Freddy’s No. 1 Combo, which is a double steakburger with cheese, fries, and a soda. Based on the speed of service (five minutes) and the price point of the food ($7.59) as well as the very existence of combo meals, Freddy’s seemed to be firmly in step with the Whataburgers, Chick-fil-As, and In-N-Outs, the brightest and glossiest lucidas of the fast-food constellations. These chains are typically regional, either privately held or family owned, beloved, and often slightly more expensive than their big national brethren such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s.

Meanwhile, fast-casual burger joints like Shake Shack or Five Guys generally have no combo meals. There, what I had ordered at Freddy’s would easily have cost $11 to $13 and would likely have taken at least twice as long, depending on how lucky I’d gotten with the line. “My preference would be for people to think of us as fast casual, but I think that it’s probably more perceived as fast food,” Simon explained. “Face it, you generally don’t go through a drive-thru on fast casual and expect to have any kind of speed of service. The same with inside the house. We feel like for the quality of the product that we deliver, part of it is because we smash it, we cook it fast.”

For Simon, to be fast casual was to enviable; when we met, that segment was in the midst of a flush period of surging sales. But in the following weeks and months, Chipotle, the singular poster child for the meteoric rise of fast casual and whose mantra was locally sourced Food with Integrity, suffered through one of the more astonishing stretches of food-borne illness outbreaks. Within a short time, at least seven different episodes from California and the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest to the East Coast involved norovirus, salmonella, and E. coli. Roughly five hundred people were poisoned or sickened, one incident drew a grand jury subpoena, Chipotle’s stock plummeted, and their co-CEOs had their 2015 salaries cut in half.* Finally, in 2018, with its recovery still flailing, it poached Brian Niccol, the head of the ostensibly villainous Taco Bell, to become its new CEO.

To this point and beyond, Chipotle and its snowballing fast-casual kin have been benefiting from the perception that because their food by all appearances is more “wholesome,” it’s also healthier than fast food. But this idea may have some wishful eating baked into it. In 2016, researchers at the University of South Carolina studied over three thousand entrées from fifty-two chains and found that main items at fast-casual restaurants averaged two hundred calories more than their fast-food counterparts. It’s a complicating revelation for an industry that has been marketed as a healthier response to fast food. “While being aware of calories and sodium can be helpful, there is a dark side to an overemphasis on numbers,” one dietitian told Reuters in response to the study. “It can distract customers from what makes foods healthy—nutrient density, fiber content, antioxidants, quality of the fat, et cetera. It’s important to look at health more holistically.” Nevertheless, another study, by The New York Times, in 2015 estimated that the typical order at Chipotle is 1,070 calories, which is nearly double that of a Big Mac, which, at 560 calories, is roughly the average for a fast-food entrée. “Most orders at Chipotle give you close to a full day’s worth of salt (2,400 milligrams) and 75 percent of a full day’s worth of saturated fat,” the study noted. Simon, who spent much of his early career opening locations of the fast-casual chain Panera, confirmed this dynamic: “I can say Panera does a great job on salads, and Panera is perceived to be very healthy. But I could take you over to Panera and fix you a sandwich it would take two Big Macs to catch up to. And probably fries, too.”

With neither better nutrition nor better food safety nor better wages guaranteed at fast-casual restaurants, one effective way to differentiate between fast food and fast casual might be to reduce it to a $5-plus lunch and a $10-plus lunch, respectively. And often, that price point can mean the difference between a social experience that transcends financial and generational divides, and one where the clientele generally resides within the same age and financial brackets. According to data released by the food-industry research firm Technomic, consumers aged forty-five or older constituted either 43 to 44 percent of the customer base of McDonald’s, Burger