Mar. 31, 2024 "Inside the A&W test kitchen, a battlefield in the fast food wars": Today I found this article by Paula Duhatscheck on CBC:
One of the latest volleys in the multibillion-dollar fast food wars started with a late night on Karan Suri's TikTok.
A&W's director of menu development was scrolling his phone when he came across the "pickle girl" trend that was making the rounds last year, with women (and one very loud and adorable three-year-old) showing their love for preserved cucumbers.
By the next morning, he was mixing up different pickle-based sauces in the burger chain's test kitchen in North Vancouver. Five weeks later, he'd nailed down a recipe that formed the bedrock of last summer's A&W spicy dill burger.
"Our supplier … nailed it in the first go," said Suri, standing in the test kitchen in mid-March, noting that the five weeks from idea to product was a record for him.
Pressure to shake it up
While much of the industry's appeal comes from its familiarity,
fast food brands also face pressure to shake up their menus in response to growing competition and changing consumer tastes.
Often, this process begins with rolling out a new limited-time offer, which brands hope will generate buzz and, if they're lucky, inspire McRib or pumpkin spice latte levels of devotion.
It's a high stakes game for the $42.6-billion fast food industry.
While fast food joints have fared well amid inflation,
the industry's growth is starting to slow
while the number of competitors continues to rise,
according to the retail analytics firm Circana,
and staying relevant is key to staying in the game.
Art vs. science
Stepping into the A&W test kitchen is like walking into a supersized version of a fast food kitchen, with about 10 times the equipment. Different restaurants have different grills and fryers, so the space needs an unusual abundance of gear to make sure recipes work the same no matter where they're rolled out.
On a recent visit, the space was meticulously clean and notably aroma-free.
It's here that Suri — who previously worked at luxury hotels in India, Kenya and the United Arab Emirates — along with his team, try to figure out what the next thing is that customers will want to eat. It's a process that's both a science and an art.
Though Suri got his pickle sauce in five weeks, developing recipes can in some cases take years.
A Nashville chicken glaze went through 57 different variations before the team hit upon a version that could be mass produced and stay shelf-stable inside a hot restaurant kitchen.
"It needs to be to work in those very, very tough kitchen environments," said David Loi, Suri's copilot in the test kitchen and a food scientist.
A&W gets reams of data from its forecasters and suppliers about what flavours are popular now and which ones are expected to take off in the years ahead.
From menu hack to menu item
It also looks to consumers.
For the first time, the company introduced a new menu item this year based on a menu hack. A Mississauga franchise owner noticed customers from the South Asian community were buying hamburgers but substituting hash browns for beef patties.
"I'm from India and there's a big, big population of vegetarian folks there," said Suri. "They don't eat meat, don't eat chicken — but we have hash browns."
Shifting demographics are a key part of why restaurants mix up their menus in the first place.
Many burger-and-fry chains have their roots in the mid-twentieth century, but since that time Canadian consumers and their palates have changed.
"A lot of these new immigrants, they are your guests now — they come with their own flavours and their own cultures and their own cuisines," said Suri.
Smaller, globally inspired chains compete for dollars
Vince Sgabellone, food service industry analyst for Circana Canada, said the traditional burger chains find themselves competing against a greater number of fast food players with globally inspired cuisine — for instance,
Osmow's Shawarma,
Thai Express and
Roti Butter Chicken, he said.
And it's not just fast food where that shift is happening, according to flavour expert Cecilia Pereyra.
From snack foods to drinks to desserts — some of the most popular flavours in North America right now have their roots in other parts of the world.
"Ginger, spicy honey, jerk flavours, miso, tahini, sesame seed flavours — those are all increasingly popular," said Pereyra, global product marketer for International Flavours and Fragrances, a U.S.-based company that develops flavours for everything from multivitamins to potato chips.
Competition on the rise
For legacy brands, the trick is to marry new-to-them flavours with the familiar products they're known for.
Adding a new seasoning or sauce to a mainstay, like a potato chip or hamburger, is a common way to do that
— a concept known in the industry as "familiar discovery."
"'Familiar discovery' is the idea that we can give someone something reasonably familiar
and then just put a layer of novelty over top of it that makes it new and interesting,"
said Derek Vella, director of the University of Guelph Food Innovation Centre.
"[Customers] are more likely to buy it that way, more likely to enjoy it," he said, pointing to the new iced yuzu drink at Tim Hortons as another example.
Spicy everything
Inside the A&W test kitchen are about a half-dozen spicy sauces under development. They range from a Sichuan-style chili oil-based sauce to a Moroccan pepper aioli that features notes of cinnamon and coriander.
"In Canada spicy has just taken off in the last four years, and it's not your traditional hot sauce spicy," said Suri.
A&W has about 70 products in the works right now, though only a small number will make their way out of the test kitchen and into a test market — and only after extensive testing.
"A lot of the decisions we make … [are] based on data, from going into our supplier partners' facilities and dialling in exactly how everything gets produced down to the millimetre, down to the gram," said Ioi.
He estimates he's cooked their limited-edition piri-piri burger about 500 times to ensure the cooking instructions are specific enough.
"Everything has to be very consistent and almost exactly the same."
It's time-consuming work, but industry analyst Sgabellone said there's more of it happening.
During the pandemic many restaurants closed their test kitchens and pared their menus back to simplify and save money.
But as the world has opened up, brands are increasingly rolling out new menu items, whether they're entirely new recipes or nostalgic re-releases.
"That wave of innovation is flooding back into the market right now," he said.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/a-w-test-kitchen-fast-food-wars-1.7151343
Mar. 18, 2025 "McDonald's Canada testing a vegetable-based burger — again": Today I found this article on CBC:
McDonald's Canada is trying its hand at a vegetable-based burger — again.
The fast-food chain announced Tuesday that it will test its new McVeggie at some restaurants in Langley, Richmond and Surrey, B.C., as well as Brampton and Windsor, Ont., and Dieppe, Moncton, Riverview and Sussex, N.B., until April 14.
The sandwich, which will come in regular and spicy habanero varieties,
has a breaded patty made of
carrots,
green beans,
zucchini,
peas,
soybeans,
broccoli
and corn.
It comes on a toasted sesame bun and is topped with shredded lettuce and sauce.
The dish is the latest attempt by McDonald's Canada at courting customers uninterested in or unable to consume popular staples like the Big Mac.
Prior attempts to cater to vegetarians have not succeeded, leaving the sandwich portion of the company's menu full of beef and poultry options but little for those who don't eat meat.
The chain's most recent menu item prior to the McVeggie was the plant, lettuce and tomato or PLT.
The sandwich made with a plant-based Beyond Meat patty was tested in September 2019 at 28 restaurants, predominantly in London, Ont.
It later expanded to 52 locations covering neighbouring Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph in a 12-week trial beginning in January 2020.
"That wasn't quite what consumers are looking for," chief marketing officer Francesca Cardarelli conceded while sitting at a McDonald's restaurant in Brampton, Ont.
She figures part of why the PLT missed the mark was because its patty was designed to mimic meat as most of the hot plant-based meat alternatives did about six years ago.
At the time, a Nielsen study revealed that
43 per cent of Canadian consumers expected to increase plant-based food consumption,
and in the two years prior, had bought four per cent less meat.
Buoyed by these reports and others suggesting the
plant-based "meat" market would be valued at $135 billion US by 2035,
fast-food joints such as Tim Hortons and McDonald's rushed to offer such products.
However, diners didn't take to them and they were eventually pulled from menus because of a lack of demand.
The McVeggie attempts to learn from all that.
"This is just something that's more craveable and more desirable," said Cardarelli, who said she eats two a week.
Whether someone has dietary restrictions or is seeking variety, she thinks the dish's appeal is obvious as soon as one takes a bite out of the sandwich and spots the mélange of chunky greenery that forms the patty.
"You can really see the vegetable component in it, which I think adds a bit of a vibrancy and uniqueness from what we've tested in the past," she said.
"This is what they're looking for now."
McVeggie differs from international options
Testing that theory will be the culmination of months of product development, studying PLT feedback and looking at vegetable-based products McDonald's trialed elsewhere.
India, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand have also sold sandwiches called the McVeggie at times, but they're not the same as McDonald's Canada's offering, which was developed for this country specifically.
The sandwich, however, is not completely made with Canadian ingredients because Cardarelli said the country's climate makes it "quite difficult" to source domestic produce year-round.
The company would not name what countries other than Canada it will get vegetables from.
The pressure to ensure the McVeggie is a hit is high, not just because of the past failures but because McDonald's stands to win over even more customers who might have eaten elsewhere because of a lack of plant-based options.
Its research shows about 35 per cent of Canadians have some sort of food limitation,
whether it's an allergy or a personal preference,
and about half of the time that one-third determines where the group they're dining with go to eat.
McDonald's will watch whether the McVeggie shifts this trend and analyze how often people come in for the sandwich, what they're ordering with it and whether it fits into their routines.
"I'm hopeful they will feel the excitement and then gravitate toward a product like this," Cardarelli said.
"Ultimately, it's going to be their voice that helps us determine whether this stands to something bigger or not."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-mcdonalds-vegetable-based-burger-trial-1.7486841
Welcome to the 21st century, Ronald.
My opinion: I ate the veggie burger from A&W in 2021. I just ate the patty, and it didn't taste like anything. There was no flavor. Then I ate the rest of the burger.
The other 2 blog posts of the week:
"Hudson's Bay to sell off all merchandise at 6 stores previously spared from liquidation"/ "Hudson's Bay to lay off more than 8,300 employees by June 1"
https://badcb.blogspot.com/2025/06/apr.html
"Hudson's Bay receives approval for sale of 3 leases to B.C. mall owner Ruby Liu"/ "B.C. billionaire Ruby Liu gets keys to first retail store once owned by The Bay"
https://badcb.blogspot.com/2025/06/hudsons-bay-receives-approval-for-sale.html
Valerie L, Campbellton, New-Brunswick, would like to know:
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