As restaurants experiment with huge and tiny offerings, will 'medium' be the next big thing?

Nation's Restaurant News,  Nov 5, 2007  by Richard Martin

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If we've learned anything from recent trends in foodservice facilities design and menu R&D, it's that size matters.

As reported recently in these pages, "value engineering" techniques that can shrink restaurants' structural footprints yet maintain volume capabilities are helping operators cope with the rising costs of property development and occupancy.

And on the sales side of the operational equation, hay reportedly is being made thanks to the incredible shrinking burger and the bite-size burrito. Think new, sliderlike mini hamburgers, now hot sellers at several chains, and McDonald's tortilla-based chicken Snack Wraps, which have boosted Mickey D's fortunes of late.

Undoubtedly, more such downsized offerings will soon find their way into new-product pipelines as other operators learn that miniaturized items don't cannibalize sales of higher-ticket menu mainstays, but rather boost tabs as add-ons, between-daypart nibbles or, in the case of multi-miniburger slider courses, as shareable appetizers.

At the other end of the size spectrum are the so-called premium versions of burgers, burritos and the like. Think offerings like Hardee's Monster Thickburgers or newly launched Country Breakfast Burritos. The burrito--a tortilla enclosing a two-egg omelet, bacon, sausage, ham, Cheddar, hash rounds and sausage gravy--tips the scales at 920 calories and 60 grams of fat. Its debut last month elicited scorn from nutrition watchdogs and spoofs by late-night-TV monologists.

But Hardee's parent CKE Restaurants no doubt will have the last laugh--all the way to the bank--as it has with previous over-the-top rollouts aimed at ravenous young adults and bang-for-buck indulgers.

So as savvy restaurant architects pare down building prototypes and concoct kiosk or fast-casual variants, canny corporate chefs alternately are enlarging and diminishing the sizes of food offerings. And casual-dining culinarians have figured out a way to expand things and shrink them at the same time by proffering multiple-choice submenus of specially promoted three-course meals at a single, modest price point.

Big or small, or big and small, there's something for everyone in this strategic dance of dimensionality.

Or is there?

Grace Slick of the '60s-era rock band Jefferson Airplane famously sang that "one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small." But that psychedelic ode to perceptual extremes didn't address the common-sense middle ground--and neither are foodservice's modern-day real estate and R&D gurus.

With the move afoot to truncate square footages, will ample, spacious run-of-the-mill restaurants go the way of the white buffalo? And as culinary tacticians scale the heights of portion enormity and exploit the less-is-more virtues of micro-snacking, will food servings that might be called "medium-size" or "average" fade into oblivion?

Of course not. But as more attention is paid to bargain-priced snack items and more-for-your-money monster meals, aren't foodservice marketers and consumers likely to begin thinking of regular-size items as old hat, as hopelessly unfashionable?

I can already envision what might emerge from the think tanks of corporate foodservice if that ever happens: Regular-size offerings could be relaunched as novelty items, as the comeback kids of eateries' latest what's-old-is-new-again marketing tack.

Just think of how TV spots might pitch that message: "Are you tired of those sissy-sized snacky things that some chains try to foist off as a sandwich? Or are you suffering from big-burrito fatigue, annoyed that those overstuffed tubes of caloric excess keep leaking into your lap as you try to tune the car radio?

"Well, we've got just the thing for you. Try the new, ergonomically advanced and dietarily middling Average Burger. It's not guilty of a stingy, $1.29 tease or sumo-sized $3.99 overkill. It's easy to hold in one hand and will fill you up just right, and for the right price!"

Trends ebb and flow, and everything under the sun seems to go away and return in almost predictable cycles. If we now see a movement toward carts and kiosks, can the big-box backlash be far behind? And if portion sizes now are swinging simultaneously to the far reaches of bigness and smallness, might that in time bring centrist offerings back into fashion?

Whatever sweet-spot sizes that restaurants and portions assume during future evolutions of food fashion, the current dimensional flux reminds us that foodservice is a living, breathing organism of sorts with an almost organic impulse to adapt to economic and consumer environments. Recent size-related trends also reinforce the truism that crucial details--big and small--demand operators' attention and can bite them on the back side if ignored, whether they're matters of facilities, foods or the human interactions that define hospitality.

Who'd have thought, for example, that the simple telephonic interface between reservation takers and prospective guests could be as fraught with business-stunting risks as it was shown to be in a recent undercover expose in the Los Angeles Times?