Food for Thought

Taco Bell’s has launched its $2 Meal Deal, as described in USA Today.  The deal is a taco or burrito, medium soft drink, and bag of Doritos for $2.  Given the massive successes of McDonald’s Dollar Menu and Subway’s $5 Footlong, it seems likely that consumers will go for a deal at this price point. [...]

From Google, via Eater.com, here’s a fascinating table of “hot” search trends around dinnertime on Mother’s Day.  6 of the top 20 are for chain restaurants. Though anecdotal, this is the best evidence I’ve seen of ability of Search impact to drive restaurant traffic.  Many of the best retailers are already testing to quantify the impact [...]

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting story here about diners who are increasingly picky about avoiding certain classes of food (dairy, gluten, salt, fat, nuts, etc.).  In time, this trend seems likely to work its way from the coasts to the heartland, and from extreme demands on high-end restaurants to constant demands on casual [...]

Here’s an amazing statistic (and a fantastic accomplishment), courtesy of QSR Magazine: McDonald’s U.S. sales topped $30 billion last year, outstripping the next-closest competitor, Subway, by $20 billion. If Subway were suddenly to merge with Burger King and Starbucks, McDonald’s would still rank No. 1 on QSR’s annual QSR 50 rankings, by a margin nearly [...]

Another PE deal today. See Part I of our thoughts on Private Equity buying restaurants below.

Oracle makes an interesting attempt at setting social media targets here.  To quote: Typical [goals] might be to acquire customers, engage them, then convert them. So that translates to: Increase Facebook fans and Twitter followers Increase comments/posting and retweets Increase redemption of offers via Facebook and Twitter While not unreasonable, we call these “second derivative metrics” [...]