Fast Food Empire: The Rise, the Fall, and the Recovery

Introduction to Fast Food

Fast food, a type of diet that was not present a hundred years ago, is now consumed by more than one-third of all American adults per day. Its popularity in the U.S. has grown substantially; more than 85 percent of all restaurants in the U.S. serve fast food. So what exactly are fast foods or fast-food restaurants? According to the Oxford Dictionary, fast food is defined as "easily prepared processed food served in snack bars and restaurants as a quick meal or to be taken away."

Most people believe that fast food refers to hamburgers, fries, and drinks. Indeed, most fast-food restaurants in the early stages of the "fast food era" (typically around the early 1900s to mid-1900s) started by selling hamburgers, fries, and drinks. However, fast foods these days are served in tons of varieties, including sushi, sandwiches, hot dogs, and even pre-assembled salads.

The diversity of fast food choices and fast-food restaurants operating on a global scale has given fast food a unique identity on global diets and how it affects our lives. This essay will introduce fast food from its origin to its prosperity, how it felt, and how it is signaling a change in the modern era.

The Origin

One of the first fast-food restaurants in the U.S. was White Castle, which was established in 1921. Most meals in restaurants cost about 70 cents ($18.23 in modern-day, a 2504% increase). Even hamburgers sold in restaurants were about 30 cents ($7.82 in modern-day, a 2507% increase). Hamburgers sold in the White Castle were five cents apiece and attracted both customers and competitors under their affordable price and immaculate sanitization.

In the 1920s, lunch meat was popularized because of its ease of cooking. Home cooks just needed to slice the meat and put it in a pan, and delicious hamburgers were made; even restaurants started to use lunch meat as a source of their fine cuisine. However, restaurants were reportedly seen serving dirty beef patties that contained ingredients of spoiled meat. This created a gap between fast-food restaurants and customers, and hamburgers were often considered "food of the poor."

However, what is certain is that White Castle made the first significant effort toward diminishing the gap by creating a kitchen assembly line and standardized operating system. Moreover, they allowed transparent glasses to be around all their kitchens. Therefore, the public felt safe about hamburgers and fast foods again. These concepts are also seen in other franchises, including Mcdonald's and KFC, which copy the core idea of White Castle. With more and more competitors joining fast dining, White Castle started to fall, but this also marked the thrivingness of fast-food restaurants.

Rewriting "Time"

Starting with the creation of fast food by the White Castle in the 1920s, by 1950, fast-food chains, epitomized by McDonald's, revolutionized the way fast food industries work. As society gets more and more fast-paced, fast-food companies offer a tempting benefit that no other restaurants have: convenience. People didn't have to spend time in their kitchens and going to grocery stores to prepare meals anymore. They only need a few minutes from ordering to getting the food. "Fast-produced meals" means everything on the menu is produced by a factory somewhere and then shipped to the store. This means that the store only needs to heat the pre-cooked meals, and they are ready to be served to customers. Many fast-food brands even installed Drive-thru services that further increase the convenience of getting a meal - all of it can be done sitting in a car.

As a result, Americans eat more than 20% of their meals in their cars. Moreover, fast foods are not similar to fine dining. The invention of hamburgers, fried chicken, and other fast foods requires the most primitive way of eating, using bare hands. This simple way of eating prompted more customers to choose fast food over different types of dining. These designs minimized the time needed for the customers to get their meals.

Faster and Cheaper?

If convenience didn't play a significant role in some customers' decisions, its affordable price was the success that attracted customers to eat fast food. According to the company Fast Food Menu Prices(FFMP), fast food corporations buy food in large quantities, lower the price, and then distribute it to each store. The local U.S. government has been paying farmers and supporting them to provide more meat. Also, the separation of duties was implemented very effectively. Imagine a store clerk who would have to take your order and payment, put on their gloves, assemble the burger, fill the drinks, put them in a bag, and hand the meal to you. This would not only be time-consuming but hard to coordinate and cost more because of the defiant in productivity.

However, in global fast-food chains like Mcdonald's, especially in drive-thrus, people who place orders are different from the one who cooks your meal. This means that employees can make your food faster, and if meals can be delivered in a short time, they can make more meals and therefore drop the price of fast foods.

The most crucial element that contributes to the affordable price of fast food is the way of producing it. Because fast food stores only need to heat pre-cooked meals, possibly frozen patties or fries, they do not need to hire professional chefs. Since the job of heating meals is easily replaceable, fast food stores can hire an employee with less salary, therefore reflecting it on the price of the meal.

Staying the Same

The convenience and price of fast food played an essential role in promoting fast food to the public, but its consistency brought fast food out of the United States and into the world. Often, when food franchises are launching more and more stores, one barrier they face is the struggle to keep up with the consistency of their stores. Because different stores have different kinds of management, their service and food quality differ, causing customers to taste completely different flavors in surprisingly close places. Stores would adopt new flavors and meal options, and if these meal options have a sour taste. It would affect the store and the fast-food brand as a whole. Therefore, according to the Daily Mail, fast-food chains came up with management systems that focused on ensuring that all the meals being sold were made from a central factory. In addition, these factories utilize machines to process rather than humans. This keeps the consistency of pre-cooked food sent to the stores because the amount of cooking time, the weight of raw meat, and the size of french fries are all controlled accurately by the machine. As a result, meals from fast-food restaurants maintain consistency. According to LinkedIn, an online service provider company, "Supply the same great product their customer base has come to know and love, every time, without exception."

The Fall

Like McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, and other renowned fast-food brands seared their name into customers' hearts, in 2004, a documentary named "Big Sized Me" hit the U.S. like a big slap towards the blind mouths of intake. In the documentary, the host himself decided to eat sets from McDonald's three times a day for thirty days. As he recorded how his body changed, he also revealed many unknown secrets about fast-food corporations.

As these secrets were revealed, people started to embrace healthier meals that contained more fiber and less fat. In the same year, McDonald's canceled the "super-sized" drinks as large as a two-liter Coca-Cola bottle. The reasons attributed to the fall of fast food industries in the early 2000s are:

• The rise in obesity rates

• The scandal of mass farming

• The increase in awareness of healthier diets

Getting Overweight & Obese

As the increased sedentary lifestyles and high-calorie foods surrounded urban populations, obesity rates have sky-rocketed to more than two-thirds of all American adults in the early 1990s. Compared to the obesity rate in 1950, it had increased by more than 50 percent over just half a century. Unsurprisingly, most of the factors came from a change in the type of diet. Fast food companies supported the deregulation of the food industry and contributed negatively to the obesity epidemic. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), salt, saturated fat, and excess sugar are classified as disease-causing, which fits the description of most fast foods. An excessive amount of salt and fat can be found in hamburgers in french fries; in fact, they contain an average amount of around 850 micrograms of sodium. This doesn't sound like much, but compared to the daily recommended sodium intake by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of 2300 micrograms, 850 micrograms of sodium in just one dish can be very deadly.

In addition, fast-food meals usually come with combos, and these combos use great discount coupons to attract customers. The calories of fast foods are not neglectable; a well-known Big Mac Combo is at a staggering 1320 calories. This takes more than 6 hours of walking to burn these calories. Not to mention that the super-sized drinks in McDonald's contain roughly 240 grams of sugar, well over the 50 grams of sugar intake recommended by the FDA. Therefore, these sodium and calorie bombs quickly overtake one's body and not only cause obesity but also the risk of having long-term health issues and heart disease. With all these factors that caused obesity rates to skyrocket, the FDA started to establish regulations on fast foods and marked the fall of the fast-food industry for the first time.

The Scandal of Mass Farming

As fast-food industries tried to use their affordable price to attract customers, they were simultaneously giving up the meat quality. Humane, or behaving humanely, is defined as having or showing compassion or benevolence to another individual. Going by this instance, many fast-food industries' chickens were everything but humane. For example, McDonald's entertained mass farming and raising livestock. Its chicken used to make McNuggets was all cramped in a small barn. Food was fed to them every hour, and because they were living in a dark space, all they could do was eat and eat. In addition, McDonald's injected growth hormone into chicken bodies, and these chickens, compared to the ones in 1950, have grown two times quicker and often came with organ failure and other diseases.

Also, fast-food corporations conducted inhumane farming practices such as thumping. According to Mercy for animals.org, thumping means that piglets who are sick and don't grow fast enough are killed by slamming their heads toward the hard concrete ground. Finally, as animals are being slaughtered, they still can't leave the dumpster life they have been around for their whole life. Fast food companies killed animals with, according to them, "proper sanitization including the disinfection with ammonia." Tragedy happened…

Kevin, a two-year-old boy, died just 12 days after eating a hamburger on a family vacation. The autopsy showed that his intestines all died, which was caused by a bacteria named Escherichia coli. This bacteria got into the meat when the animal was being slaughtered. However, one can tell that the inhumane treatment of animals and the cramped and unsanitized space accounted for a big part of why bacteria could get in the animal's bodies when being slaughtered. Nevertheless, as protests against animal abuse started to thrive around the nation, revenues in fast-food chains began to level. Fast food restaurants like Mcdonald's, KFC, and Subway suffered from a decrease in revenues from the early 2000s to the early 2010s.

Awareness of Healthier Diets

In the early 2000s, the increase in obesity rates and large scandals of mass farming caused the bankruptcy of the fast-food industry. However, in the early 2010s, a new enemy emerged: Healthy diets. SunOpta, a company that "focused on natural food, ingredient sourcing, organic food, and specialty foods," along with other companies promoting healthier diets, quickly started to seize the market. Moreover, these "healthier" food brands incorporated the idea of sustainability and claimed that their food is sustainable; no land is being harmed through the harvest of crops.

On the other hand, customers started to embrace healthier diets and valued their health more than ever. As research on the negative impact of fast food on heart diseases and type-II diabetes was clearer, consumers started to eat "healthier foods," whether it was true. Therefore, the market share of "healthier" food corporations "was estimated at USD 95.56 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 104.27 billion in 2021". Back in the 2010s, the straw that broke the camel's back crushed the management systems of fast-food industries. According to the FDA, as part of the healthcare reforms in the 2010s, Congress imposed new legislation that required fast-food companies to provide extensive nutrition information on every item on the menu. This meant that customers understood how unhealthy their food was and therefore turned even more towards healthier food choices, although it might cost more. Together, all these factors that happened to start from the early 2000s have pushed fast-food industries for a change, a change that turned against its original aim.

Healthier Food Choices

Fast food, known for its unhealthy and long-term risky diet, was being criticized by the public. However, fast food restaurants are sensing the opportunity for healthy food choices. Therefore, fast food industries continue introducing more meal options with fewer calories and fat.

In 2007, Taco Bell and KFC announced they were switching to new cooking oils free of heart-clogging trans fats out of its 5,500 stores in the U.S. The tactic worked, and according to Statista, Taco Bell's revenue increased from 1147 million dollars in 2007 to 1265 million dollars in 2008. This showed a significant amount of change in profit through the target of different types of customers. Even McDonald's, the company that refused to change its cooking oil, is "vowing to ramp up marketing of healthy options by offering fruit and vegetable options as part of its meal deals," according to Business Insider. In addition, according to Statistica, more than 67% of the population in the U.S., considered to be a culture that is the most dependent on fast foods, are now frequently reading the ingredient lists. In comparison, 51% of the population said they always look for healthier options when shopping.

Unsurprisingly, in a study that analyzes the options on children's menus at 20 popular fast-food chains between 2004 and 2015, researchers found that "one fruit and non-fried vegetable as an option increased by nearly 58 percentage points between 2004 and 2015." Also, bundles with healthier drinks rose from about half in 2004 to 80 percent in 2015, signaling a significant change in the fast-food industry. This shows that most people around the world are changing their diet habits and that it is crucial for fast food industries to fulfill what these customers need to maximize their profit in the food industry.

The Rise of Advertisements

In the thrive of fast food, this essay talked about how fast food was convenient, cheap, and consistent in quality. These three crucial benefits are still holding on to the core concept of fast food. In 2020, the average meal in fast food restaurants was about four to seven dollars, and it is located right at the balance between convenience and price.

On the other hand, fast food does not cost as much as restaurants, which usually comes at around 20 dollars, according to Fox Business. Although it is more expensive compared to a home-cooked meal, it saves much more precious time that can be "spent" on other things, one might say. These "advantages" are being communicated to the public by advertisements, which are significant ways fast food industries surround us with it.

Advertising is one of the popular ways fast food industries promote their benefits, and this trend will last for a long time. Also, fast food companies use red advertising with extensive and short words to grab the customers' attention. These red advertisements are attention-getting, and in psychology research, when one sees red combined with yellow and orange, one becomes passionately hungry. This is why fast food industries use red as their primary color in advertisements - to affect the desire for customers to buy their meals. According to the Rudd Center, fast food industries spend more than 5 billion dollars on ads, and the market size of fast food industries has grown about 2.9% per year for the fifth year in a row.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed the fast food industry from its start, to how it thrived, to how it felt, and to the modern transition. We passed through time and talked about core concepts of fast food industries and how they turn those advantages towards sales and market shares. As fast-food industries thrived in the 1920s unpredictably, we can never predict what challenges fast-food industries will meet in the future. Fast food industries thrived because of their convenience, price, and consistency. Through the rise in awareness of obesity rates, mass farming scandals, and healthier lifestyles, fast food industries met one of their most significant setbacks.However, they stood out from their setbacks and used new ways to steal customers' hearts by introducing healthier food options and using advertisements to spread awareness throughout the country. One can never predict what setbacks will affect fast food industries and how they will overcome them in the future. But what is essential - is that the next time you see a fast-food restaurant, think about how it, just like all other fast-food restaurants, earned a spot in the massive food industry before you take that big bite of the juicy hamburger you ordered.