Many years ago, I worked at McDonald's. One day, we got a letter for the corporation, telling us that a change had been made to procedure. One of the sandwiches, the double cheeseburger, I think, had been changed. Instead of putting one piece of cheese on top of the meat patties and the other on the bottom, we were to put one on top and one between. We had to retrain everyone to make this sandwich this way. Supposedly this seeming minor change had been suggested by McDonald's panel of professional taste testers, who said that the sandwich tasted better with the new arrangement than with the old.
The other day, I watched a YouTube video, where a professional taste tester for some ice cream company demonstrated the process of taste testing. He started by taking a small ice cream taste spoon, getting a scoop of ice cream on it, and then depositing the ice cream on his tongue, much like the typical customer does. All similarities disappeared from there though. He began to rapidly smack his tongue against the top of his mouth, sucking in air in between. He explained that doing this aerated the ice cream, allowing him to better taste the subtle nuances of the flavor. He then spent more than a minute doing this, periodically stopping to call out some attribute of the flavor he had discovered. Clearly this man knew exactly what he was doing, when it came to favor analysis of the ice cream. Equally clearly though, the ice cream company that hired him and his colleagues knew nothing about business.
After watching this video, something struck me. One person in the comments said, "That's amazing! That is exactly how I eat my ice cream! It is really nice to see someone affirm what I have been doing for years!" I don't know if this was intended sarcastically or not, but my internal response was, "Yeah, and you are probably the only person that does it who is not a professional taste tester."
I realized something here: Food companies are hiring highly trained, professional taste testers to decide whether or not food is suitable for the general public. We have taste testers carefully aerating the food as they taste it, to identify flavors that not one of us will ever notice, because we don't eat food like that! At this very moment there are probably flavors being rejected that the general public would love, because after three minute of aerating, a taste tester got the slightest hint of bitter, and there are probably flavors that are going to go onto the market that are terrible, because some taste testers liked the particular "bouquet" of flavors, of which the vast majority of us will only taste the most prominent two or three.
I teach my video game design students that the most important person is the player, and it is critical to know and design to your target audience. This includes getting members of your target audience to test and provide feedback on your design. This applies equally to taste testing. Do you want the tiny percentage of your population that are taste testers to like your product, or do you want everyone else to like your product? Hiring professional taste testers to test a product that you intend on marketing to people who are not professional taste testers is...well...kind stupid.
This leads to another thought though. McDonald's, Burger King, A&W, and every other burger joint are doing it wrong. Consider this: When you attend a barbecue, how do the burgers work? Is there a guy who cooks the meat, puts it on a bun, adds condiments, and then hands out the finished produce? Every barbecue I have been to had a guy cooking the meat, but he would just put it on a plate on a table or maybe a tail gate. Near the plate, other ingredients would be arranged, including ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise, lettuce, cheese, and so on. There was not anyone assembling sandwiches to hand out. People were expected to come make their own sandwiches. And they didn't just throw everything on either. Each person would pick the ingredients he or she wanted. Everyone's sandwich was custom made. There was no default build, where any deviations counted as a "special order".
Welcome to modern burger joints though, where anything customized is a "special order", even though in real life, there is no "non-special" order. And this is not because it is not feasible for every order to be specially made. No, Subway has proven that made-to-order sandwiches for every single order is not only possible, but it is also quite competitive. Made-to-order McDonald's would be even easier, because Subway has some 20 or 30 ingredients on their table, while McDonald's has maybe 8. Honestly, implementing this would not even be difficult.
The typical burger joint is not arranged in a way that is friendly to made-to-order burgers. This is fine though. Subway needs the options to be visible, because there are so many. McDonald's, Burger King, and so on don't. The first step is to replace the antiquated POS system with something more user friendly, and flip the monitors around. When the customer orders a sandwich, display a graphic of the preparation table, with small text labels for each ingredient. The customer can then touch the ingredients to toggle them on or off. With the small number of ingredients, this would be pretty straight forward. There would no longer be a standard build for sandwiches, though there might be a default selection of ingredients for each, to make things easy for the occasional customer who wants to order 200 sandwiches (yes, that actually happens, and they are typically cheeseburgers). A well designed system could even beat Subway for ease of use, and it would not require any layout of the restaurant design. Even the software upgrade would be pretty cheap, as any programmer worth his or her salt could produce a better system than the existing one a few months or less.
What this all comes down to is that most fast food places don't know their target audience. They hire professional taste testers when they should be hiring taste testers randomly selected from their customer pool. They violate certain traditions and assumptions associated with the kinds of food they serve. If they knew their target audience better, they would likely be significantly more successful, because normal people would enjoy their food more, and they would be more comfortable with the process surrounding ordering it, because many people find asking for special accommodations embarrassing. The state of the fast food industry is pretty sad. Maybe one of their executives will read this and apply my suggestions, and their brand will beat everyone else into the dirt. I doubt it though.
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