Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets

by Barry Gibbons

  Now, a competition: if the two industries are linked, what’s the rock song title, from the past fifty years, best suited for a potential new quick-service brand? Email me at GibbonFile1@aol.com. We can only offer honour and publication as a prize. My entry is Crying, Waiting, Hoping, released by the Beatles in 1963.

  3. Time for reinvention

  I am, of course, a definitive Boomer. I arrived at the ordering point of the drive-through of life in January 1946, the first full year of post-war peace. As it happens I arrived very early, weighed in at less than 4 lbs and was not expected to last the night. I survived, and immediately set about my life goal of putting on another 185 lbs.

  Depending on which definition you use, I was followed by up to 100 million fellow-Boomers in the United States and Western Europe. From my deep research on the subject, I have one unchallenged observation about my peer group. We are all profound liars.

  Here’s an example. At the drop of a hat, or at the remotest hint of a lull in a conversation, a true Boomer will regale you with a reprise of his or her exploits from the 1960s – which has to be a lie. If they were Boomers, they wouldn’t remember what happened in the sixties. Take my story, for instance. There were four of us who were inseparable friends: me, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Bob Dylan and Cassius Clay. We went everywhere together, and, my, oh my, did we get into some scrapes. One night, in the mid-sixties, just before the Newport Folk Festival, I remember we were crowded into Bob’s dressing room. We were all working with him on the lyrics to Maggie’s Farm when he suddenly looked up and told us he was going to forsake his folk-singing heritage and go ‘electric’. We told him he was mad. He had just achieved icon status as the legitimate heir to Woody Guthrie, and here he was throwing it all away.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Cassius soon turned his back on everything that had secured his champion status – renouncing his name, religion and the establishment that had promoted him. He then re-emerged as Muhammad Ali, which seemed to us another daft idea doomed to failure.

  What history shows is that neither of them threw anything away. They both looked at their level of achieved success, and – for whatever reasons – decided to change. In their case, however, change wasn’t about tweaking. It was a fundamental reinvention of everything they did and stood for. At the time, it wasn’t seen to be risky – it was seen to be suicidal, because nobody else saw the need for it. Everybody forecasted doom.

  What happened, of course, was the opposite. In both cases, they took themselves to higher levels, actually grew the markets they operated in, and became global statesmen.

  Let’s contrast their brave approach to change with the quick-serve restaurant industry generally, and some of its ‘stars’ specifically. For sure, there have been substantive changes. (And, equally for sure, still more are needed.) If you look at any of the great names of today, they bear little or no resemblance to their genesis models in the 1950s. There has been huge and fundamental change.

  So, what’s the problem? The problem was – and remains – in the timing and mental approach to change in this business. Almost every substantive change in the quick-service industry came as a response to a period of worsening performance. It came after a peak of success. It came when owners, investors, franchisees and customers (delete as applicable) were becoming increasingly unhappy with what they were getting out of the current offering. It came from increasing pressure to do something – almost anything – to stop a down-trend. It was reactive to decline, not proactive to new growth opportunities. I do not believe the history of the quick-service industry has witnessed one Dylan-esque or Ali-esque example of reinvention before everybody else saw the need for it. The movers and shakers in quick service do not have the mindset to take risks with what seems a successful concept, one that seems to have some mileage left in it. The strategic approach to change falls somewhere between ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and ‘Milk it for every penny, then we’ll figure out what comes next’.

  Does it matter? After all, we can cheerfully agree that ‘big changes’ have happened over the period in question, so what’s the big deal? I think it does matter. Reactive change is usually just a sticking plaster. It addresses the symptom, not the disease. The whole mentality of change management in this scenario is one of doing as little as possible to get by; to prop the figures up again for a few quarters. Then you repeat the whole thing – probably with a new executive team and advertising agency. Proactive reinvention is different. It is enormously risky, and you are constantly ambushed by the CW2 guys (‘It Can’t Work, Won’t Work’).

  But you are thinking ahead positively, not backward negatively. You are planning your growth with a clear mind. You are also planning to change and grow the actual market within which you operate. And you are planning for long-term success – to be a market icon or statesman.

  The quick-service world is now made up of brands and operations with sticking plasters all over them. How significant is that? If somebody had thought like Dylan or Ali, one of the ‘Big QSR Names’ would have invented Starbucks.

  Now, did I tell you about the four of us and the Cuban Missile Crisis? How I won £10 in this crazy bet with Che Guevara? Man, those were the days …

  4. Only the good die young

  Those who are familiar with my entry in Who’s Who often remark on the things I have omitted. For rather obvious reasons, I have deliberately left out my gold medals from the Berlin Olympics, my ‘friendship’ with Tallulah Bankhead, and the fact that I am the last first world war fighter-pilot ace writing about fast food.

  A rather more surprising omission, however, is my Nobel Prize for QSRs, awarded in the early 1990s. It was awarded, if you remember, for my breakthrough work on the genome of Burger King’s Chicken Tenders. Yes, it was I who finally solved the mystery of the DNA architecture of this astonishing product.

  The linking of scientific thesis and fast food has been frequent, and, in my observation, almost always useless. In my time, I have personally been confronted by thousands of pieces of scholarship on the subject and ignored them all.

  Bouncing around the internet recently was a piece by Carol Sorgen, a distinguished medical writer. With umpteen quotes, and references to other people’s works (all of whom had letters after their names), a thesis was advanced that suggested fast food can be healthy. It seems possible to have a low-fat meal in a quick-serve, and also possible to have a meal that has a good supply of nutrients. The bad news is, and I quote, ‘It’s going to take some planning’.

  Just what we need. Welcome to the future. Going to a KFC is to become like D-Day.

  I have nothing against Ms. Sorgen, and wish her well. Fortunately, the Constitution allows me to say that I found the piece to be the most vacuous and pointless treatise I’ve come across in years. And, remember, I’ve seen Sting live in concert.

  There are only two attitudes to fast food: acceptance and non-acceptance. Those who harbour the latter disposition would not go in a quick-serve to save the lives of children. So, there is no point writing anything with them in mind. Interestingly, those who accept it may not actually frequent quick-serves, but the important point is that they accept that quick-serves play many roles in the lives of millions of people. Those roles may range from the provision of an essentially cheap substantial meal each day, to the provision of what many people openly prefer to a gourmet meal of pan-fried pigeon breasts nestling on a bed of wilted spinach.

  In all the roles the quick-serves play to this audience, it is my observation that affecting health by a marginal amount by skipping this or downsizing that is never present. The arrival of more choices – both for eating in and eating out – plus the wider understanding of broad health issues, has already happened. But that’s like off-stage music. Quick-serve users have made their minds up at another place and time as to what role quick-serves play in their lives, so how about just having faith in them to use their own best judgement?

  I do know this: if the providers of quick-serv
es think users will be influenced by quick-service-specific health sermons, they are making a big mistake. Almost every effort I have seen that aspires to the changing of behaviour in quick service for ‘health’ reasons has failed. It doesn’t matter if it was the provision of a special ‘healthy’ product, advertising, information, or even changing a brand name – it tanked.

  In the early 1990s, we in Burger King tested a (relatively!) healthy version of the Whopper, along with countless other ‘healthy’ new products. None of the ‘healthy’ stuff tested well enough to launch (particularly if it was marketed as ‘healthy’), but it was the reaction to the idea of altering the make-up of the Whopper that astonished me. To mis-quote Tom Clancy – the clear and present message we got back from test markets was: ‘Do not, under any circumstances, mess with the Whopper. We may only eat one a week, or even one a year. But when we do, we want it to dribble down our chins during eating. And we insist that the calorific intake associated with eating it, together with fries, ketchup and a soda, remains the equivalent of that eaten by the total population of Pakistan during an average week. And if you do change it, buddy, you will be in big need of the Federal Witness Protection Program.’

  Health, and healthy eating, are not complicated. They do not need science, lectures, sermons, or nannying. Quick-serves have played a part in my life – as has every other kind of eat-in and eat-out experience. What is needed is a personal philosophy and some life rules. My waist was 34² (that’s 86 cm to you metricated types) in 1965 and has been the same ever since. Follow these rules and never worry about your health, your food, or where you eat again:

  Never eat anything you can’t lift.

  Never eat anything that has any green in it.

  Never eat anything described as ‘tasting like chicken’. (This rule is particularly important in South Korea.)

  Never eat anything that doesn’t have lungs.

  Never eat anything that is surrounded by dead flies.

  Most important – never eat anything that has to be explained by a waiter.

  5. In defence

  Like most writers operating in the world of food and beverages, I have my sources in the Vatican. A few weeks ago, two of them e-mailed me with a ‘heads-up’ warning on a terrifying pending announcement. In a panic I rushed to Italy, but my personal plea remained unheeded. A senior theologian of the Catholic Church issued a statement condemning the quick-service food industry. I quote the translated version of his historic epistle: ‘The sense of community is absent, fast food is not a model for Catholics.’

  Now, I don’t want to get off on a Grumpy Old Men-style rant here. And I should declare, at the outset, that I am not religious in the normal sense. I am a Paranoid Agnostic, not believing in a God as such, but believing there is a force out there that is out to get me. My thoughts on Catholicism, specifically, are those of anybody with a healthy mind on a religious Establishment that has only just ratified Copernicus’ work and is still uneasy with Darwin. But in this case I am going to let fly – this guy is dead wrong.

  This attack essentially bemoans the death of the collective meal, which has been one of history’s binding agents for the family. The traditional family model – with its associated behaviour, activities and attitudes – has all but gone, and I share the sadness at its passing. But to put a chunk of the blame on fast food is fatuous. The biggest single element in the deconstruction of the family came when Mum stopped shouting ‘C’mon guys, dinner’s ready, come and get it’ and moved to ‘Hey Billy (or Mary), whaddya want to eat? Can I ding something in the microwave for you? Then you can eat it while phoning your friends, and somebody else will clean up afterwards.’ I look forward to a Catholic edict on the effects of this change of behaviour on the family, and, while we are at it, on TVs in kids’ bedrooms, anti-social behaviour orders, iPods, working mothers and mobile phones.

  The age we live in has thrown massive change at all of us. Some of it is phenomenally good, but most of that is accompanied by stuff we can’t handle. Unprecedented wealth creation has benefited millions – but it has been divisive, with the gap between rich and poor widening. There are still too many poor people in rich countries, and too many rich people in poor ones. The ‘information age’ has revolutionised every aspect of accessing data and communication – but opened cyberspace to bomb makers, identity thieves and sexual predators. These are the uncomfortable by-products of progress, as is the demise of the ‘traditional’ family.

  I am sick of the quick-service world taking hits from shallow thinkers who can’t see beyond the end of their quills. Everybody has a go – QSRs are air-dirtiers, carcinogen generators, body-fat developers, and now, it seems, family destroyers. Let me give the detractors a couple of fast foods for thought.

  If you go into a McDonald’s in any shopping mall on a Saturday, at lunchtime, you will see families eating together – some of them (I grant you, not all of them) happily smiling and chatting amongst themselves. If you examine the whole postal code that contains that mall, during the same lunch hour, you will not find a single family together at a domestic table. Trust me.

  When I was CEO of Burger King, I used to get millions of figures shovelled in front of me. One stuck in my mind then and is still with me today. We sold two million Whoppers every day across the world. That’s two million people – about 0.035% of the earth’s total population – who got at least one cheap, hot, substantial, nourishing meal in every twenty-four-hour period. And here’s another aspect that these gloomy plonkers find hard to handle: Most of these two million who opt for the Whopper, or whatever else it might be from the huge range of fast food available, do so because they prefer it.

  Is fast food destroying the health of the civilised world? This probably annoys me most of all. Of course, if you eat three large pizzas a day, seven days a week, for thirty years, you will explode, Monty Python-style, and discolour several nearby walls. Ditto hamburgers, fried chicken, burritos, fish and chips, kebabs, chicken jalfrezi and anything else – quick, slow, or self-service. But quick-service restaurants are not the problem here. Personal weakness and/or addiction and/or greed are the problems. It becomes a matter of how you use the quick-serve and how you eat.

  I loved Julia Child, the (sadly now deceased) American Earth Mother of cooking. She talked more common sense than any hundred of the current TV chef-entertainers. Listen to what she says about how to eat: ‘Small helpings, no seconds, no snacking, a little bit of everything, and have a good time.’ It is my observation (although sadly not my personal experience) that if you applied such glorious common sense to any way of eating, you would be perfectly healthy. If you applied it to a life and a diet that had to be, or was by choice, predominantly in quick-service restaurants, you would be just fine.

  Now I must rush. My sources in Tibet have just informed me that His Holiness, the new Dalai Lama, is going on prime time TV to complain about the American habit of putting cheese in cans. This I might find tough to defend.

  6. Crumbug: a call for action

  Normally, my inventions crash and burn on take off. This might have something to do with the marks I scored in my last science exams in 1962. I got 3% in chemistry and 4% in physics. Or it may have been the other way around. Hence, when I went to the market with my breakthrough electric snooker cue some years later, the market took no notice.

  I have, however, invented a language. Well, not the language itself, but the name for a language that is now widely spoken and written.

  I arrived at Burger King more than ten years ago. The company, which was then part of the Pillsbury group, had become the ‘victim’ of one of the last contested corporate acquisitions of the second millennium. The ‘victor’ company was then called GrandMet. I worked for them in London, and I either won or lost some straw-drawing competition (I’ve never been sure which) and arrived at BK’s corporate headquarters in Miami as soon as the ink had dried on the deal.

  Contested acquisitions usually get ugly. The defending company’s shar
eholders are normally happy, but the defending management team normally fight to the death with everything and anything. This usually includes character assassinations of the predatory company’s management. This whole process involves assembling stuff that might prove embarrassing when you lose, and the new management team arrives.

  This explains why, when I arrived and found my way to my new office (in which you could have held a small Cup Final) the drawers were empty. There wasn’t a document anywhere – with one exception. Looking forlorn and lonely, the Pillsbury Mission and Values Statement was in a frame hanging on the wall. As I read it, two things occurred to me. The first was the irony. If the company had lived by half of the articulated contents, I would never have been there reading it – Pillsbury would never have fallen in combat. This was a real tension breaker, and I finished reading it with a big grin on my face.

  The second point was one of style. Have you ever read one of these things? They are full of split infinitives (‘to boldly go …’). There are at least six adverbs per column inch. Tonally, they are arrogant and out of touch with reality. This particular one was so full of crap and humbug that, there and then, I invented my new language name: Crumbug.

  Go and read your company’s statement. Look at those of other companies (somebody has put a collection of them in a book). If you can come up with a better name for the language, I will cede the floor to you. I know a bunch of top executives – and many of them spend hours, days, weeks, word-smithing Crumbug. In their judgement it is vital that an assortment of corporate audiences, internal and external, understand the common goals and values of the organisation. That may be true, but if it is, writing Crumbug is not a good use of a leader’s time. It is a good use of a hired-in English professor’s time. A leader’s job is to have a dream: to see future shapes that others don’t see – shapes that will give the company winning distinction. The leader shouldn’t try to articulate these shapes – they are best if they can be drawn in crayon. In the dreary world of 1950s clothing retailing, Luciano Benetton saw a different kind of clothes shop. He saw a shape that changed retailing forever. I suspect he never wrote it down.