Posts Tagged ‘fast food’
“Tell it like it is”*…
Most fast food chains court children. Mr. Delicious targeted depressed adults. Jake Rossen reports…
It’s not often that a mascot for a fast-food franchise will detail the discomfort prompted by hemorrhoid surgery in a national television advertisement. But Mr. Delicious rarely played by the rules.
Mr. Delicious was the cartoon spokesman for Rax, a chain of roast beef eateries that grew popular in the 1980s. But by 1992, sales were dwindling—so the company recruited “Mr. D” to liven up their brand identity. Middle-aged and burdened by a difficult marriage, the character was an anti-Ronald McDonald.
“Mr. Delicious just had some rather delicate surgery,” he announced in one spot for value meals priced in round numbers. “If there’s no change, he doesn’t have to squirm so much to put it back in his pocket, does he? He just grabs his combo and drives ever so slowly over the speed bump.”
In other spots, Mr. Delicious would refer to his aversion to children, a midlife crisis involving inappropriately aged women, and heading to Rax to nurse a hangover.
Rax thought the irreverent Mr. Delicious was a solution to their ailing sales numbers. They were greatly mistaken…
Read on for the instructive– and very amusing– tale, along with more arresting examples of the spots (including an account of his trip to Bora Bora with two female “friends”): “The Tortured Soul of Mr. Delicious, Fast Food’s Most Bizarre Mascot,” from @mental_floss.
And watch the promotional video that introduced Mr. Delicious:
More on Mr. D at “Mr. Delicious: The Fast Food Mascot Who Had A Mid-Life Crisis” (source of the image at the top).
* R&B singer Roy Milton in 1954 (canonizing a phrase in use since the 1940s in Black speech)
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As we brood over branding, we might that it was on this date in 1879 that saccharin (AKA saccharine, benzosulfimide, or E954), an nutrition-free artificial sweetener, was discovered by Constantine Fahlberg and Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins University. 500 times sweeter than sucrose, it can have a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations.
Commercialized from soon after its discovery, saccharin took off during the sugar shortages of World War I. It was (and to some extent still is) used as a stand-alone sugar substitute (e.g., “Sweet’n Low), to sweeten products like drinks, candies, baked goods, tobacco products, excipients, and for masking the bitter taste of some medicines.
The FDA required warning labels from 1977 to 2000 on products using saccharin because it was a suspected carcinogen. After additional research, the FDA repealed the warning labels and declared saccharin safe for consumption.
“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000″*…
And that change is coming for China… Even as trade tension tighten between China and the U.S., foreign investment in China drops, and talk of decoupling grows (see, e.g., here and here), one sector of American business is doubling down on the Chinese market…
There’s been no shortage of tough news for China’s economy as some of the world’s biggest brands consider or take action to shift manufacturing to friendlier shores at a time of unease about security controls, protectionism and wobbly relations between Beijing and Washington.
Count Adidas, Apple and Samsung among those looking elsewhere.
But as a tumultuous 2023 for the Chinese economy comes to a close, there has been at least one bright spot for Beijing when it comes to foreign investment: American fast-food chains have decided a market of 1.4 billion people is simply too delicious to pass up.
KFC China’s parent company opened its 10,000th restaurant in China this month and aims to have stores within reach of half of China’s population by 2026. McDonald’s is planning to open 3,500 new stores in China over the next four years. And Starbucks invested $220 million in a manufacturing and distribution facility in eastern China, its biggest project outside the U.S.
This is surely not what Chinese President Xi Jinping had in mind as he made the case to American CEOs about the upside of China’s “super-large market” last month while he was in San Francisco for a summit of world leaders. The investments in fast food and other consumer goods, while Washington is curbing exports of computer chips and other advanced technology, don’t fit into China’s own blueprint for modernizing its economy…
Unlike manufacturing plants, fast-food franchises are relatively easy to set up and break down and don’t have to worry about IP security/theft. So, even as trade policy hardens and manufacturing/tech companies lean away, “American fast-food companies find China’s 1.4 billion population too delicious to resist,” from @BusinessInsider.
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As we supersize that, we might spare a thought for Fred Turner; he died on this date in 2013. One of the first employees hired by McDonald’s entrepreneur Ray Kroc, Turner rose quickly through the ranks, and succeeded Kroc as CEO in 1977.
Turner founded Hamburger University in 1961 and was a co-founder of Ronald McDonald House Charities.
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six”*…
Domino’s in Taiwan has been innovating, and now there’s a new sheriff in town…
The new pizza is dubbed “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall” pizza. It includes abalone, scallops, sea cucumbers, garlic short-ribs, fish skin, quail eggs, taro, dried bamboo shoots, and cabbage.
It’s a step beyond last year’s version which had pig’s blood and preserved eggs while there was another that had a bubble tea (tapioca) topping, which many people found surprisingly tasty.
Another used durian as a topping which has a smell no one could forget.
There has been a growing demand for Western takeaway in Taiwan since the pandemic began and stiff competition has meant some bizarre attempts to get attention…
If you question how anyone could put pineapple on a pizza you won’t want to see what Domino’s has done: “Domino’s lays down the challenge in Taiwan with bizarre pizzas.” [Via the always-illuminating @TodayinTabs.]
* Yogi Berra
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As we reach for the red pepper flakes, we might note that today is the penultimate day of National Pizza Week (which, as a practical matter, your correspondent celebrates every week).
“The science which feeds men is worth at least as much as the one which teaches how to kill them”*…
We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time…
Scientists are replacing crops and livestock with food made from microbes and water. It may save humanity’s bacon: “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.”
* French epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
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As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1943 that an official of the Meats Division of the wartime Office of Price Administration (OPA) announced that, for the duration of World War II, frankfurters (or ‘hot dogs’) would be replaced with “Victory Sausages,” in which a substantial proportion of the meat in those sausages would itself be replaced with “an unspecified amount of soybean meal or some other substitute.”
Victory was achieved; but it was not, in this dimension in any case, sweet.
“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes”*…
One of Northern Europe’s arguably most distinctive exports is “slow TV”: real-time recordings of train journeys, ferry crossings or the migration of reindeer, which regularly draw record audiences.
Among perhaps the most successful — and least exciting — examples of that genre is the live stream of a McDonald’s cheeseburger with fries. At its peak, it drew 2 million viewers a month. The only element on the screen that moves, however, is the time display.
The burger looks the same way, hour after hour.
As of this week, it has looked like that for 10 years.
Purchased hours before the corporation pulled out of the country in 2009, in the wake of Iceland’s devastating financial crisis, the last surviving McDonald’s burger has become much more than a burger. To some, it stands for the greed and excessive capitalism that “created an economic collapse that was so bad that even McDonald’s had to close down,” said Hjörtur Smárason, 43, who purchased the fateful burger in 2009. To others, the eerily fresh look of the 10-year-old meal has served as a warning against the excessive consumption of fast food…
A symbol for our times: “The cautionary political tale of Iceland’s last McDonald’s burger that simply won’t rot, even after 10 years.”
* Breakfast of Champions
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As we muse of the messages in our meals, we might send gloriously-written birthday greetings to today’s epigramist, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; he was born on this date in 1922. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is probably best known for his darkly-satirical, best-selling 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer, and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell– “I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity”– though early in his career Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child. And of course, Vonnegut’s life and work are resonant with Mark Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Author Josip Novakovich marveled that “The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that Vonnegut will “rightly be remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist of the counterculture“; The New York Times agreed, calling Vonnegut the “counterculture’s novelist.”
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