Benefits outweighs the risks when considering implementing menu items that offer higher nutritional values

Introduction

The fast food industry, also known as Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), has been serving up tasty morsels for as long as people have lived in cities. The modern system of fast food franchising is believed to have started in the mid 1930's when Howard Johnson franchised his second location to a friend as a means to expand operations during the Great Depression. And oh how it has grown! As cars became commonplace, the drive-thru concept brought explosive growth to the idea of food-on-the go. “Fast Food” was added to the Merrion-Webster dictionary in 1951 and U.S. fast food companies are now franchised in over 100 countries. In the U.S. alone there are over 200,000 restaurant locations! Revenue has grown from $6 billion in 1970 to $160 billion last year, an 8.6% annualized rate.

Fast food franchises focus on high volume, low cost and high speed product. Frequently food is preheated or precooked and served to-go, though many locations also offer seating for on-site consumption. For stands, kiosks or sit-down locations, food is standardized and shipped from central locations. Consumers enjoy being able to get a familiar meal in each location, and menus and marketing are the same in every location.

In the past two decades, the percentage of away-from-home expenditures that consumers allocate to fast food has increased nearly five percent, with fast food sales approaching $125 billion in 2004 (Jekanowski, pp.11). At the same time, a trend toward more healthful eating has emerged as food labels have become common place and consumers have learned to adjust their eating habits based on nutritional information, citing that nutrition facts do influence their eating habits. Yet, these nutrition labels are not required to be placed on any of the nearly 218 restaurant meal items that an American eats in an average year (AARP, pp.13).

Surveys show that two-thirds of chains do not provide any sort of nutrition information, with chains like McDonalds and Burger King, with their interactive menu planners online being the exception rather than the norm (CSPI 2003). This paper seeks to determine whether consumers reward chains who post nutrition information by eating there more often. This will be accomplished by ranking leading fast-food chains by the number of ways in which they provided nutrition information and examining whether chains that offer more information have higher levels of system-wide sales growth.

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in United States. Currently, more than 65% of Americans are overweight or obese (1). Obesity is correlated with several medical conditions, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and certain types of cancer. Obesity and its related diseases are responsible for ˜400 000 deaths per year in the United States, paralleling the number of preventable deaths caused by smoking (2). Overweight in pediatric age groups has nearly tripled in the past 30 y (3). Today, an estimated 16.1% of adolescents (12-19 y of age) in the United States are overweight ...