John Lawn

Not long ago, Bloomberg BusinessWeek ran a story called “Fast and Furious,” a look into the processes that undergird the fast food drive-through industry. The article's upshot, besides detailed descriptions of the service and production systems used by today's fast food companies, was that “the drive-thru isn't just a convenient way to fill your car with fries; it's a supreme achievement in American manufacturing.”

Later, the story quotes Taco Bell CEO Greg Creed (formerly of Unilever) as saying, “I think at Unilever we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day.”

Pointing out that foodservice has as much in common with manufacturing models as it does with hospitality service models is not news to our readers. Industrial engineering approaches to kitchen layout and process control approaches to everything from food safety to quality control have long had an impact on their businesses.

Not mentioned in the article is a concurrent trend I found myself discussing more recently with a distributor executive who is an old friend and a close observer of the challenges facing the industry. That is, something important is being lost when quickservice starts to become the dominant mode of dining behavior.

On the one hand, its delivery model certainly meshes well with the up-and-coming generation's habits: its members have come of age in recessionary times. Customers have become dependent on “value meal” bundles and, as my friend pointed out, tend to dislike having to tip for service. Their socialization increasingly takes place not in face to face venues, but via text messages, social networking software and gaming consoles.

But food and foodservice traditionally provided a core socialization venue in our culture, whether it was in sitting around the family dinner table, hanging out at the soda fountains of the 1920s, meeting friends at a casual dining restaurant after work on Friday afternoon or going out on a date to a fine dining establishment in order to impress a new girlfriend. Food was an essential ingredient in many kinds of social activity.