May 24, 2012

Jordan Melnick

Jordan Melnick is QSR's online exclusives reporter.
Burger King debuted several menu innovations to compete with McDonald's.

Embattled burger chain investing a lot of money in its future to get past its recent troubled past.

Wingstop built its own cloud service to assist its restaurant operators.
May 2012

New technology helps restaurants streamline operations and make sense of all the data they’re collecting.

Eric Justice has used high oleic soybean oil at Pei Wei.
April 2012

High oleic soybean oil should help restaurants offer customers menu items that meet the demand for better nutrition and more taste.

March 2012

Airports across the U.S. are adding a more local feel to their concourses in an attempt to offer travelers a better sense of what that city has to offer.

National fast food brands should take note. As airports strive for more of a local feel, limited-service companies that are pushing...

February 2012

McDonald’s signs boast about the incredible number of hamburgers—now many billions—it’s served over the years. But with the customer clamor for specialty beverages growing louder, the fast food icon may one day brag about the number of peppermint mochas sold.

When...

January 2012

Late last year, McDonald’s announced that it would launch in 645 California stores its own TV channel that broadcasts news, sports, and local-interest stories. The move resonated loudly across the industry, signaling that food alone might not be the future of quick-serve dining rooms....

With at least two mid-size restaurant chains planning to expand through highway travel centers in the coming year, other quick serves looking to grow may want to hit the open road.

Both Huddle House and Fazoli’s, which, respectively, have 430 locations and 230 locations nationwide,...

December 2011

To an outsider, rewarding employees for a job well done seems to be simple. You could give them a cash bonus, buy them a gift card, or, if they’ve done really well, send them on a much-deserved vacation.

But operators are finding that these incentives aren’t so easy to...

Google announced the launch of its Google+ Pages earlier this month as an opportunity for brands to get involved with the search giant’s new social network. 

And while a recent study shows that a majority of the world’s top 100 brands have already launched a Google+ Page...

November 2011

With 12.8 million workers, the restaurant industry is one of the largest employers in the country. Industry champions often boast of the distinction, and particularly now, with national unemployment at 9.1 percent, it appears as if the restaurant industry is playing a hefty role in the U.S....

On a daily basis, Don Elam, a Chick-fil-A owner-operator in Chandler, Arizona, does something unusual: He makes sure the playground outside his restaurant is spic and span.

“Every night we have a person that has a sanitize rag crawl through and wipe down everything,” Elam says...

October 2011

When Phil Friedman stepped down as CEO of McAlister’s Deli, a sandwich concept based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, that he grew from 30 to almost 300 locations during his 11-year tenure, many of his friends and colleagues assumed the 65-year-old industry veteran had retired.

“...

As the vanguard of the Internet Age, Generation Y—the Millennial Generation—has been cast as a paradigm-busting demographic that requires businesses and marketing strategists to rethink everything.

But a recent study on Millennials finds that the demographic may be more...

With the housing market still depressed, food prices on the rise, and unemployment hovering above 9 percent, some economists now fear that the nation is on the verge of entering a second round of recession, if it hasn’t already.

While the prospect of a “double dip” into...

September 2011

The food truck trend has gathered so much steam that there wouldn’t seem to be enough tires left in America to get another mobile kitchen trend like the food bike rolling along.

While the number of food bikes pedaling through city streets doesn’t compare to the number of food...

On August 5, President Obama proposed several tactics that would help military veterans returning to civilian life find jobs. The president also called on Congress to re-introduce the Help Veterans Own Franchises (HVOF) Act, which was originally introduced in 2009.

The new proposals, and...

August 2011

Between its 1986 founding and 2002, the year it started franchising, Five Guys Burgers and Fries opened six locations, all in the Washington, D.C.-metro area near its home base in Arlington, Virginia.

Since 2002, Five Guys has opened more than 750 locations and is now mentioned in the...

The menu-labeling mandate that will eventually require all chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menuboards was met with optimism that the restaurant industry had turned a new leaf in nutrition. But a recent study suggests there’s a lot of work to do before restaurants’...

A week after the announcement that he’d acquired Salsarita’s Fresh Cantina, former McAlister’s Deli CEO Phil Friedman says his plan for the fast casual is to saturate its existing markets.

Friedman says his strategy is to “exploit” Salsarita’s presence...

On May 3, the fast food restaurant Beef Burger in Greensboro, North Carolina, celebrated its 50th anniversary by offering customers burgers for 50 cents.

“We had a line from the window all the way out the back door and all the way across the back parking lot,” owner Ralph...

June 2011

When Superior Uniform Group (sug) began manufacturing uniforms in 1920, chances are no one in the company ever thought it would launch a media division more than nine decades later. But in a sign of the times—in which more businesses than not are undergoing major technological...

After two years of salary freezes, restaurant chains are starting to increase employee pay in an effort to secure their loyalty, according to a new survey by consulting firm Hay Group and the Chain Restaurant Compensation Association (CRCA).

The survey cites a projected median budget...

May 2011

Imagine this: You walk into a McDonald’s for a quick bite on a workday. The place is busy, and customers are unwrapping their food at the tables and biting into burgers, salads, and wraps. But when you push to the counter, there is no one there to take your order. No cashier smiling at you...