Mike Roberts, a former CEO of McDonalds, has a new restaurant called Lyfe Kitchen that he hopes will make fast food healthy and green. An excellent article in Wired details his plans, the heart of which is a stunning amount of technology that reinforces Matt Yglesias frequent point that the line between services and manufacturing is often blurry.
There’s the innovation their chicken supplier has made which cools slaughtered chickens using cool air rather than a pool of chlorinated water. This is apparently provides better food safety and is environmental because:
"You’re not mixing all these chickens in a bath of water, where contamination can occur. And you’re saving 30,000 gallons of water a day."
Then there is the technology of food preservation:
"Yesterday’s supply-chain infrastructure, the one that Roberts and his colleagues helped to perfect, was based on boxed patties and buns that had been treated with preservatives and designer enzymes. But new flash-freezing and high-pressure-pasteurization methods have enabled retailers like Lyfe to deliver dishes free of magnesium lactate, triammonium citrate, and other preservatives."
So what are the challenges holding it back? One of them is remaining organic. The menu for the restaurant involves a lot of root vegetables, which are difficult to supply organically due to the length of time they take to grow. Hopefully they will be willing to make sacrifices in the name of expanding their business, especially since the health and environmental benefits of organic foods are often exagerrated.
This model of fast food builds on the existing food system, as Tyler Cowen argued for in his recent book An Economist Gets Lunch. Rather than try to feed everyone using farmers markets and neighborhood gardens, this model utilizes the efficiency and technology that our modern food system is capable of producing. Even if this venture is not successful, I imagine something like this will be in the future.
(Source: forbes.com)
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