A Healthy Challenge for Restaurants

Recent business press describes a healthy challenge for restaurants that may have much of the industry painted into a corner. Many restaurant chains are burdened with a well-deserved image of peddling low-quality food that promotes obesity. This burden leaves them noncompetitive in a market increasingly driven by millennials (18-30 year-olds) who are eating out less and demanding healthy, high quality options when they do.

Says Hank Cardello of the Hudson Institute:

Restaurants can no longer afford to price-slash their way to growth; they must also find innovative ways to attract these health-conscious customers by giving them what they want. If they don’t, they will be missing out on the biggest growth opportunity in decades.

 Tony Pace, Chief Marketing Officer for Subway, puts it succinctly:

People have talked about health and food for a long time, but I think millennials are acting on that information in different ways. They want healthy food, but it also has to be interesting food that tastes good.

Some in the industry are rolling they eyes at this talk and doubling down on dollar menus. They just might wake up and find their brand is dead.

Click here to read more from the New York Times and here to read more from the Hudson Institute.

Pick Your Poison, photograph © Scott Ableman / flickr

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