fast food – praag.org

McDonald’s losing the fast food fight

In the fast food fight for customer spending, one restaurant giant is struggling while rivals scoop up diners’ dollars.

Last week, McDonald’s reported its global comparable sales fell again, dropping 0.7 percent in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, comps at Burger King rose 6.7 percent in constant currency while Arby’s comps rose 7.6 percent during the second quarter. Several other large restaurants are also showing positive growth.

“It seems like the only big player doing negative numbers, period. They’re in a healthy market but they’re not participating in that market,” said David Palmer, analyst at RBC Capital Markets, in a phone interview.

This comes after several blockbuster years at the chain where it delivered a string of mid-single digit comp increases in the 2000s after a successful previous turnaround plan called “Plan to Win.”

In its domestic unit, McDonald’s comps have lagged its fast-food sandwich peers (a group that includes Arby’s, Burger King, Carl’s Jr., Jack in the Box, Wendy’s, Sonic and Subway) each month since October 2013, according to data that its investor-relations team provides to analysts using data from The NPD Group.

Source: CNBC

Russians plan to ‘Eat at Home’

Russian renowned film directors and brothers, Nikita Mikhalkov and Andrey Konchalovsky, are willing to create in Russia a chain of fast food restaurants, alternative to Western ones, and have asked the government to allocate one billion rubles ($18.65 million) for the purpose, the Kommersant daily wrote on Thursday citing the brothers’ letter to the Russian government.

“Andrey Konchalovsky and Nikita Mikhalkov ask the government to help in establishing a nationwide chain of public catering, alternative to the Western chains of fast food,” the newspaper writes. “But to launch a pilot project of cafes branded ‘Let’s Eat at Home’ the partners need 971.8 million rubles ($18.13 million).”

The Kommersant says that “today the topic will be on the table of Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich.”

A nationwide chain of cafes branded “Let’s Eat at home” is supposed to be set up, the daily says, and Konchalovsky’s wife Yulia Vysotskaya, actress and TV hostess, who is the brand owner, is expected to become the face for new chain.

“The project aims to substitute imported foods and to create an alternative to Western chains of fast food restaurants,” the film directors say promising to gain profit in a span of 4.8 years.

“Let’s Eat at Home” eateries are planned to combine small shops and cafes, with regional foodstuffs making up 30-40% of the menu.

Also, the eateries are expected to provide dishes to social facilities, in particular to children’s homes.

McDonald’s suffers worst monthly decline in more than a decade

The American fast-food giant witnessed a sharp decline in global profits in August, hit by the closure of its restaurants across Russia and a “rotten meat” scandal in China.

McDonald’s earnings with stores open at least 13 months slid taking a worse-than-expected hit in August, falling 3.7 percent, the Oak Brook, Illinois-based hamburger chain said in a statement on Wednesday. This is the biggest monthly drop since 2003, according to Bloomberg. Market analysts had expected a 3.1 percent drop in earnings.

Across Europe, where McDonald’s brings in a hefty 40 percent of its total earnings, proceeds were down 0.7 percent.

Much of the decline is connected to Russia, where health officials last month closed 12 stores, including the first-ever McDonald’s outlet in Russia, which opened to tremendous fanfare on January 31, 1990 in the center of Moscow, as well as two in Sochi, the host of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Meanwhile, Russian health inspectors are investigating hygiene conditions at 100 McDonald’s outlets nationwide over alleged issues.The closure of three of its outlets in Moscow came at the same time that Russia introduced a one-year embargo on agricultural products from the United States, the EU, Canada, Australia and Norway, in response to Western economic sanctions over Moscow’s alleged involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

The fast-food giant said it will “do everything it can” to continue operations in Russia.

Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said that Russia has no plans to completely shut down the restaurant chain.

“No one is talking about it at all (a ban on McDonald’s in Russia),” he told reporters. “It has just happened that the inspections were completed at the same time (as the ban on Western goods),” Dvorkovich said.

McDonald’s has 440 outlets and over 35,000 employees in Russia, which ranks among the company’s top seven markets – outside the United States and Canada – according to its 2013 annual report.

The fast-food company sold more than $1.5 billion worth of meals to Russian customers in 2013, attracting one million people daily to its outlets in Russia, according to its website.

At the same time, domestic demand for the food franchise sank for the fourth straight month in August, falling 2.8 percent.

Meanwhile, the company’s Asian markets took a major hit after it was reported that Chinese meat supplier OSI Group LLC was investigated for changing the expiration dates on food, prompting fears among consumers. Sales in the company’s Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa division plummeted 14.5 percent last month.

The poor economic data comes at a particularly hard time for the American hamburger chain, as US fast-food workers have been staging protests demanding higher wages, and the debate over high obesity rates in the United States is causing many consumers around the world to look for healthier food choices.

Shares in McDonald’s, which serves around 68 million customers daily in 119 countries across 35,000 outlets, declined 1.5 percent to $91.09 on Tuesday. The company is scheduled to release third-quarter earnings on October 21.

Source: RT

Meet the robot that makes 360 gourmet burgers per hour

No human hand touched this hamburger. It was made entirely by robots

The San Francisco-based robotics company debuted its burger-preparing machine last year. It can whip up hundreds of burgers an hour, take custom orders, and it uses top-shelf ingredients for its inputs. Now Momentum is proposing a chain of ‘smart restaurants’ that eschew human cooks altogether.

Food Beast points us to the Momentum’s official release, where the company says:

“Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices. Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better.”

And what might this robotic burger cook of the future do better than the slow, inefficient, wage-sucking line cooks of yore?

It slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.

Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.

It’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.

Furthermore, the “labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.”

Hear that? Without all those cumbersome human workers, your hamburger will be twice as good. For the same cost. – Food Beast