Mainstream restaurants are becoming more health-conscious and latching onto the idea of giving consumers what they want in a more healthful manner. Nation’s Restaurant News reported in February that Starbucks is starting to substitute whole milk with 2% fat free milk in coffee drinks at 300 of its locations. In four test regions (Orange County, Jacksonville, FL, Oregon and Ontario), the substitution has already been implemented as a trial. The article reports that Caffe Lattes made with whole milk have as many as 260 calories and as much as 45% of the daily allowances of saturated fat.

Although the new implementation will only cut 30 calories off of a grande latté, it highlights a new trend in which restaurants offer consumers more healthful, but not necessarily new, products. Starbucks customers have always had the option of ordering a latté made with less fattening milk, but it now appears that the company is interested in promoting health for customers who formerly did not care or who did not know how fattening a latté can be. Whereas having new, more healthful items on the menu may not interest customers, Starbucks’ new initiative can help consumers to be healthier without forgoing the lattés they love or having to order differently.

A Consumer Trends article from the February’s Nation’s Restaurant News reported that although dieting is at an all time low in America, fast food companies are offering more health-conscious meal choices. The article describes that consumers tend to look for healthful choices, but tire of them quickly and are constantly attracted to the newest healthful trend. For example, entrée salads seem to have peaked in popularity, followed by a newer trend that substitutes milk or juice for soda. The newest trend appears to be portion control and smaller orders. For example, in August, McDonald’s began offering its Snack Wrap, a smaller version of the Crispy Chicken Sandwich with 200 fewer calories, and since then, the chain has added a number of variations of the Snack Wrap made with grilled chicken.

The fact that healthful options in fast-food restaurants are “trends” to American consumers shows that the fast-food industry has yet to introduce lasting healthful alternatives to their traditional meals. Restaurants can help to solve this problem, by offering traditional fast-food meals that are more healthful and of higher quality. It is clear that the answer to Americans’ unhealthiness is not just the addition of a salad to the menu; fleeting dieting trends need to give way to permanent solutions. Consumers need to be able to order their old favorites, like burgers, fries, and pizza, yet served in a more health-conscious manner.

I’ve had a bit of free time on my hands recently and decided to map out how my diet looks from a nutritional standpoint. I used NutritionFacts.com and came up with this neat page. Then that got me thinking, “What percentage of the day’s calories should I get from breakfast?”

A quick Google search left me empty handed, but it did bring me to this page, “The Best and Worst Breakfasts” from a November 1999 issue of the Nutrition Action Healthletter. From there, I found an interesting article from this year’s March issue that talks about eating out: X-treme Eating: Increasingly Indulgent Menus Entice Diners to Pig Out. They have a semi-alarmist approach to the whole deal, but it’s fascinating reading. Makes you really think about those 1500 calorie appetizers at restaurants these days…

Two interesting articles on NYTimes cropped up in my daily reading.

The first one, “Burger King Shifts Policy on Animals” describes how Burger King recently announced that they would be moving towards acquiring cage-free eggs for 2% of their egg supply, as well as 10% of semi-cage-free pork. Sounds like an interesting move — this mirrors Costco’s recent announcement that they would be movings towards Cage-free/Organics in their egg suppliers.

The second article that caught my eye was entitled “You are also what you drink” which describes a study by the Unilever Institute that concludes that — surprise, surprise — water is the best beverage to drink (all good, no bad), followed by Coffee and Tea (wait, doesn’t Unilever own Lipton? Hmmm…) in #2, and Milk in #3. I think there need to be more ads like the Milk ads, “Water, it doesn’t do you any harm”. Any takers?

At the Natural Products Expo, 43,000 attendees had the opportunity to attend the keynote by Erik Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal and Chew on This: Everything you Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food.

Erik spoke about the factors that created the fast food mentality: America’s car culture and belief in speed, convenience and efficiency and aerospace’s values around science and technology. He also emphasized how “Fast, cheap food isn’t affordable.” While it’s what is fast and efficient for our companies, it isn’t so for the overall society. One third of children today will acquire diabetes.

He also spoke about the size of companies and how large companies have power over their market places. Though no company is pure and all companies have something to improve on. Erik said that we should judge a company not by it’s size, but by its actions. He spoke of his admiration for Costco, offering health care for employees and Johnson & Johnson, founded with the priorities of 1) Customers 2) Employees 3) Community 4) Shareholders.

In January, the NPD Group reported that dieting has reached an “all-time low” among American adults. NPD found that 60% of adults “would like to lose 20 pounds,” but interestingly, there are fewer Americans dieting than ever before. Furthermore, a greater percentage of Americans who are dieting are using their own diet plans, as opposed to those recommended by doctors.
I think this trend reflects the increasing importance of convenience to Americans, and Feel Good Fast Food can help address this problem.

The results suggest that Americans are quite aware that they need to lose weight, but they are less willing to diet because dieting is inconvenient; adults don’t want to give up the foods they are accustomed to eating. Similarly, the dieters who are adhering to their own diet plans instead of those of their doctors exhibit that they are not looking for the most effective diet, but the most convenient one. Americans need to lose weight without giving up the burgers and fries that they love, and Feel Good Fast Food can make this possible. Customers who value convenience over health will no longer have to choose against the latter.

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times’ Pulitizer Prize winning journalist keynoted Stanford’s Energy Crossroads’ conference today, speaking on “Green is the new Red, White, and Blue”. Friedman’s talk, built on his 2006 article of the same name, described the 3 reasons why “Green” is mainstream today: 1) Security – the price of oil is inverse to the amount of peace and freedom in the world and the U.S. army recognizes this; 2) “The World is Flat”, so everyone has an American dream which has “dirty” energy requirements; 3) Certainty about the climate change crisis has expanded beyond the scientific community.

Friedman emphasized the critical need to start now to confront climate change, requiring “the biggest industrial project mankind has ever started”. He referenced Sokolow and Picala’s 2004 article “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies” which highlights 15 possible “wedges” that could each reduce global CO2 emissions by one billion tons by 2050. If only 7 of these were implemented, global greenhouse gas emissions could be maintained at 2010-2015 levels. One of these “wedges” is to cut electricity use in homes, offices, and retail by 25%.

Retailers who want to offer “feel good fast food” should plan to participate in this global effort by significantly reducing energy consumption.

Consumers’ top restaurant orders are burgers and fries, demonstrating the true need for more “Feel Good Fast Food(TM)” restaurants. Nation’s Restaurant News reported on an NPD Group study that investigated which foods people order most frequently in restaurants. As seen from the chart below, there were mild discrepancies between male and female orders. Women’s orders are slightly healthier than those of men - 26.9% of items ordered by women are hamburgers or French Fries compared with 31.6% of men’s orders.

Despite increasing health awareness, Americans just aren’t willing to give up their comfort food - burgers, fries, and pizza. Let’s give them some better versions of the same things!

Congratulations to McDonald’s, Panera Bread, and Smoothie King, all of which opened at Abercorn Commons in Savannah, GA, the First Shopping Center in the nation to receive LEED Silver Certification. QSR magazine recently reported on the water and utilities savings of the McDonald’s which opened in late 2005 in this project, which “uses energy-efficient heating-cooling systems, reflective roofs that deflect heat, and a porous concrete that allows stormwater to drain into the soil.”

Green buildings are good for the environment and the bottom lines of companies, saving 20 to 50 percent on utility bills. So, I’m curious why McDonald’s CSR blog doesn’t mention this Green building. Why haven’t there been more Green McDonald’s developments? I know it is difficult to control LEED status if you are a retailer starting a restaurant in an existing building, but McDonald’s continues to refurbish it’s old restaurants and open new ones. Is green building truly a priority for these three quick service restaurants, or were they just fortunate to participate in this one-off Abercorn Commons project?