Food Metrics: The evolution of the fast service restaurant

In the first of two articles, Alan Guinn, active in food service for over three decades, reviews what can be defined in the food industry as the Third Wave.When looking at the history of both the "where" and "how" of quick service restaurant evolution, we can see from an historic perspective that restaurants in general and QSRs specifically have evolved from "sit down, serve the food" surroundings to today's revolutionary concepts that are successfully designed to serve customers a multitude of food styles. Cooked in a variety of ways and time frames and served in an ever-expanding array of venues, all food is designed to lead to customer satisfaction. Since colonial days when taverns served food along with ale, restaurants have evolved to offer food and drink along railroad rest stops, along high-ways for bus and auto travelers, and in cities and towns for necessary meals away from home, as well as serving as gathering places for meetings, socialization and business opportunities. Remembering the good ol' daysMany of us still remember a local restaurant where business acquaintances met for lunch or friends and neighbors gathered at dinnertime. Standard fare was prepared and served, but "specials" were also made available. In smaller towns, the special served at the local restaurant might be the center of attention of the town that day. Memories of social occasions from the era of the neighbor-hood diner are often intertwined with the food offered. Eventually, short-order cooks made their debut, waitress outfits became more unique and take-out areas evolved to provide fast service for patrons "on the go." Let's take a look at the mind-set and challenges of the restaurateurs of the evolving late 1940s to the mid 1950s and look at how this impacted the growth of concepts we currently see in the restaurant industry. There are pages and pages of online postings of wonderful memories of food-service created by the five-and-dime lunch counters of the '40s, '50s and '60s with their "sit down and be served" format that truly was the First Wave in food service. The blue-plate special, generally consisting of a meat, one or two vegetables, a roll or bread with butter and sometimes a beverage, was offered in many restaurants of the early 20th century. No one is sure whether they were started by restaurants serving railway patrons, in the lunch houses of New York, or in diners along the nation's rapidly developing road system. The price was often 49 to 69 cents, and the special always represented a value as opposed to ordering items à la carte from the menu. In the '50s, these specials could be purchased at the dime-store luncheonette for 79 cents or so. In days gone by, there was usually a different special for each day of the week. Tuesday night might be spaghetti night, and Friday would generally be the ubiquitous fish fry. At today's diner, however, expect several specials on any given night. You may find that the price is discounted to entice purchase prior to normal dinner hours. And you will probably be able to get a glass of house wine for a reduced price with your meal. Enter the luncheonetteLuncheonettes showed a slow growth and popularity in drugstores as soda fountains started to lose their appeal in the early to late 1940s. They generally were designed to accommodate drug store shoppers and businesspeople that worked in close proximity, principally during lunch. Indeed, downtown five-and-dime stores such as McCrory's/McClellan's, W. T. Grant, F. W. Woolworth's, and Kresge/KMart created a mini-wave of their own in the 1950s and 1960s when they recognized food service as a vi-able, percentage-sales and profit leader. These lunch counters helped to create the social climate of the day, and many photographs depicting social changes occurring at segregated lunch counters in five-and-dime stores can be found, especially in the South. One can argue that in the Deep South, racial integration actually had many of its roots in the lunch counters of the day. In particular, a 1960s boycott by African-Ameri­cans of a lunch counter at Woolworth's in Greensboro, N.C., brought the issue of racial segregation to the forefront. A somewhat altered concept of the din­er is being kept alive in the northeastern part of the United States to this day. Generally family-owned, sometimes first-generation immigrant owned-and-managed, these huge convocation houses of stainless steel, chrome and mirrors offer page upon menu page of food served typically in huge portions. These diners line the roads outside New York and New Jersey, up into Connecticut and west through Pennsylvania. New England has a variation of them that features fish and sea­food, staples of the region that supports their growth and development.Becoming more mobileAs we compare current trends with those of yesterday, we can see not only a shift in how food is offered but also in the frequency with which Americans eat out. The soda fountains of the '40s became the drive-ins of the '50s and '60s, and "boy meets girl, boy marries girl" became "Honey, let's eat out at the restaurant tonight."From this evolution of restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s began to emerge a new food service. Wants and needs were chang­ing since the days when Americans had seen Horne and Hardart Automats in the pages of Life magazine and knew what prepack­aged food was. As early as 1902, Horne and Hardart opened an Automat in Philadelphia where you could "purchase precooked and prepackaged foods for a few nickels." In 1912, the first Horne and Hardart Automat opened in New York City, and over the next few years, the concept grew to over 800 locations throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. By 1924, the prepackaged food at the Automat was standard fare for thousands of buyers on a daily basis. Restaurateurs of the 1940s and early 1950s watched the concept of restaurants, as they had known them begin to diminish in social importance, while American home ownership soared. GIs coming home from the war—the group known as America's Greatest Generation—were buying homes and moving to the suburbs. The Greatest Generation worked and saved and expected wives to fix food at home. They planted trees and yards and tended the grass and shrubs. They started families in lot homes with white picket fences and yards that were lush green. America's thoughts turned to jobs and building the future and a return to prosper­ity. Under the Eisenhower administration, a new series of highways known as the Eisen­hower Interstate Highway System provided a new, vastly superior set of highways to connect Americans across the entire coun­try in ways never possible before. It's no surprise, then, that restaurants evolved in a variety of ways as well. The development of these new inter­state highways through the Highway Act of 1956 changed the way restaurateurs thought about development. They needed faster, smaller, more efficient kitchens, and they needed to not only be located close to these highways but actually by exit ramps in order to be competitive. The wayside restaurant became a staple of American life. When dad, mom and the two kids fired up the family car and took off on a summer trip, there was always the roadside restau­rant along Highway 1 or Highway 301 on the way to the beach. Restaurants of every type sprung up beside Highway 90 along the Gulf Coast. New foods heretofore unavailable became favorites. A new tasty and spicy tomato-cheese pie called pizza made its appearance. Along the West Coast, Cali­fornia, especially, had its own environment and started to see an evolving concept in pancake houses and pie shops. Coco's was born in 1948, and 1953 saw the start of Danny's Donuts, which by 1959 had evolved into Denny's Restaurants. The Midwest started seeing restaurants shaped like big red barns, called, appropriately, Red Barn. In almost every American city, the frozen custard machine found a home, and Dairy Queen, Tastee Freeze and Ice Cream Palace became family hits. In the Southeast, hard­wood smokers started showing up along rural roads, and when you drove by with the windows down, the smell drew you to barbeque.Finding the common denominatorWhen you think of McDonald's in San Bernardino and later Des Plaines, Wendy's in Columbus, Burger King in Miami, and KFC in Corbin, Ky., the one element that combines all these concepts is food. Colonel Harlan Sanders sells the first KFC fran­chise in 1952. Burger King opens its first restaurant in 1954 in Miami. Ray Kroc sees the success that the McDonald brothers are having in their restaurant in California and immediately starts to sell the brothers on the idea of opening other restaurants, first to sell his Multimixers and then to run them himself. He opens his first McDonald'sin Des Plaines, Ill., in 1955. Along the way, Pizza Hut starts up in Wichita in 1958. The common thread? Food—the American equalizer. With the development of the interstate highway system through the 1960s and into the 1970s, we're on the road, and we find a growing number of meals are being eaten away from home. By using franchise and license systems of development, food vendors are able to develop chains of (continued from page 35) restaurants, thus leveraging purchasing power for all of them and using those franchise and license agreements to leverage standards of operation across franchise net works. McDonald's is a strong proponent of mandatory standards and leads the way for other chains to develop quickly. McDonald's targets television advertising to children and drives sales by reaching out to the youngest members of the family. All this occurs at a time when mobility and suburb growth are exponentially expanding. The drive-up restaurant, so important in the 1950s, starts to decline in small towns, with the exception of restaurant groups in the 1960s such as Shoney's in the South, which was still experimenting with drive-up menu boards and carhops in uniforms who brought food to the car for your convenience. A new concept begins to emerge. Where restaurants can be built along interstate highways for convenience, Americans now want to get their food without getting out of their car and . . . voilà! The drive-thru window is born, and the Second Wave of restaurants is here. Drive-thru or pick-up window technology is simple. All you need is a duplicate or shared-kitchen format with parallel serving lines, a little electronic box that lets you communicate with drivers in their cars and a way to package great food so that hot food stays hot and cold food stays cold. Americans who believe they are so pressed for time they can't get out of their cars can drive up, order and pick up their food to go! We've truly reached the epitome of American ease and convenience. New foods for changing timesThroughout the 1970s and 1980s, a variety of foods were developed by major franchisors—and in many cases by their industrious and entrepreneurial franchisees—and targeted specifically for service through the drive-thru or pick-up window. Perhaps one of the most famous, the Egg McMuffin, was developed by McDonald's franchisee Herb Petersen in 1971. It languished for months until McDonald's perfected its hotcakes, sausage and scrambled eggs. The perfect hand held food for breakfast drive-thru had to wait for the inside menu to be perfected. Over the past 25 years, we've seen a variety of concepts come and go. New foods have emerged along with new service standards. Typical restaurant fare has been packaged to go in a variety of ways. What we're seeing now is a consolidation of concepts through a variety of methods. PepsiCo divests itself of its restaurant group, and what was Pizza Hut/KFC/Taco Bell begins a new life as Yum! Brands Inc., with even more additions. The newest, hottest concepts are purchased outright or find them selves being invested in by older, more established concepts. Blended-restaurant concepts begin to develop, ostensibly to maximize day part segments across the fixed-cost components of ever-increasing real estate and the skyrocketing cost of buildings — and that's how we begin to see all sorts of co-branding and partnering of concepts. In Part II, we'll examine how the evolution of QSRs has brought the fast-casual restaurant to life.