I worked for a large restaurant retailer in the corporate office. It's a mistake to call it a restaurant company. These companies are marketing companies and marketing drives everthing. Even to the detriment of operations and efficiency.
This is a huge problem with our society. Marketing is important, but when it takes over it destroys companies, people and eventually society itself.
We see it with restaurants. Once, a restaurant was simply a place which served food; now it's a brand, an experience, a carefully-crafted image which imparts all the right feelings but only some of the substance — if any.
We see it with food. The produce we buy isn't the healthiest or the most nutritious: it's what looks healthiest & most nutritious, by metrics which no longer come close to making sense (e.g. the redness of a tomato doesn't signify ripeness in a world with artificial pseudo-ripening, and the shininess of an apple is meaningless in a world with vegetable wax).
We see it with relationships, with entertainment, with hardware (c.f. speculative execution & caching), with software (c.f. shiny effects), with political parties, with 'news' — in a word, everything. Our world is being destroyed by marketing, by appearance with no substance to back it up.
I can only identify the problem; I don't know what the solution is.
>“Asian food no longer has a health halo merely by existing,” the manager explained as I cleared away plates of mangled spring rolls. “The once ‘healthy’ perceptions of brown rice and lettuce cups aren’t believable anymore. Today, guests are linking health to nutrient density. Ancient grains. Avocado. Micro-greens.”
The experts' domain here is not what is actually healthy. Actual health doesn't even enter consideration. It's what "guests" are "linking" with health, that is, only perception matters because the operational goal is personal profit above doing right. Our food industry at large is suffering from a total preoccupation with orthogonal concerns, of which our insane food culture is the natural consequence.
Chain restaurant food relies on year-round availability of ingredients of consistent quality (although "seasonal menus" exist, they're more about marketing than availability, the illusion of freshness again). Lots of white flour, vegetable oil, refined sugar, factory-farmed meats. Restaurants are more factory than art. Raw ingredients go in, get turned to finished products and sold on-site.
Yep. The yearly appearance of the mcrib and its huge marketing push tracks the price of pork futures. McDonalds is a commodities trader as much as it is anything else.
Get off Facebook, stop eating at chain restaurants, stop buying branded clothes at national retailers, so on and so on, and encourage family and friends to do the same. Think you can’t make a difference? If as white-collar, voting, monied professionals we can’t alter the landscape with our spending habits… then use our entrepreneurial abilities to create businesses that are the antithesis of these trends.
Consider an easy recipe for a tasty lunch- bread, cheese, tomato, mustard. In the US, buying these ingredients off the shelf of a major grocery store and assembling a sandwich results in a disgusting combination.
These are four ingredients that should be delicious- and yet you have to hunt to find edible versions of each of these items and often pay wildly high prices. Store-bought tomatoes taste like water. Even the artisan bakery sections yield bitter, preservative-laden bread. Mustard is created in vats to maximize shelf life instead of quality. If you don't know how to find artisan cheese, you're stuck with plastic garbage. But the sandwich will look* incredible, like the platonic ideal of a sandwich.
This trend of cheap, attractive food is trickling up even into restaurants. I just moved to Houston, and with every new restaurant I go to I become more and more frustrated with the bland, uninspiring food even at local "hot spots". I've seen the most beautiful, awe-inspiring sushi, tacos, and burgers- all that taste like nothing.
The only places that remain safe are immigrant-run foreign grocery stores, most of which who will go out of business in the next two decades as their owners die, and their kids go into fields that actually generate money.
*Emotional because of how the basic pleasures of existing are continually sold out in order to protect the bottom line- for instance imagine living in a world with zero wilderness, in which there literally wasn't a direction you couldn't turn without seeing human influence. It's already hard to go to coastal towns and watch the waves because you'll be able to see the giant mega-hotels lit up with balcony lights.
A taco/hot dog stand is a deliberate choice wrt to the food delivery experience, i.e., informal and on-the-go. Steakhouses have always presented themselves as more formal dining options. (This includes Sizzlers! In rural areas, chains like Sizzlers have the same cachet that Mastro's or Ruth's Chris has in a big city.)
It’s all about the looks, indeed.
One thing that maybe fits with this is the societal hierarchy of our senses. Seeing is somehow assumed to be much more objective than hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. If you have very good hearing you might have found yourself in situations where you perceive an unpleasant noise that’s below other people’s thresholds and then it’s not too uncommon to be seen as a bit of a loony if you bring it up.
Smelling is the most subtle, instinctive and animal-like sense. Usually people are very polite there and in our current time it’s the norm to not say anything even if e.g. someone emits strong body odor that’s actively bothering the environment.
Vision however is thought to be objective. Photography. Pic or it didn’t happen. If object classifier checks out, it’s legit. (What else could there be?!) Digital image just like retinal image, right!?
So if you get what looks desirable (that shiny tomato or that pretty partner), you have it, you have made it. You don’t have to doubt anything because you saw similar images a thousand times in contexts that clearly said “this is desirable”. A lot comes down to how well our associative brains work with visual stimuli.
The way out of this IMHO is to stand up and build confidence and trust in your senses. If something tastes off, treat it of same significance as if that steak was suddenly of green-blue color. That would be alarming. It’s probably fine, maybe these veggies are just lacking in taste, so not dangerous but unsatisfying. If you need acting inspiration, watch that scene from Mulholland Drive where the Italian guy doesn’t quite like his espresso.
And regarding trends, the tomatoes in Europe have gotten a lot better in the last decade, particularly in the last five years and that’s largely due to Dutch farmers starting to focus on producing strains with a lot of aroma. It started off as a more pricy premium option but now they’re affordable and available all year-round.
In fact, a lot of marketing dollars are spent advertising the things you seem to cherish. Organic food, healthy food, fitness, health — they're multi-billion dollar industries, with multi-billion dollar advertising budgets.
This is also the case for the majority of businesses that produce consumer goods these days. Companies are now purely design and marketing shops (for example, any company involved with sporting goods). Engineering, manufacturing, materials, warehousing, the "boring" parts...all farmed out with added markup.
Same thing with Google, Facebook - marketing and advertising control our economy. (And the danger western democracies face: It’s a natural switch from marketing to political influencing. Tools and methods are the same and the same infrastructure can be used.)
Any economic system is an attempt to solve the core problem of how to best distribute resources to consumers of resources. But what happens at the point when ideal distribution is attained, and all consumers are satisfied? If the economy just shut down, it would be a social disaster, so instead it enters this kind of degenerate state you mention where marketing and advertising predominate over production and distribution. Like a star going supernova- all the useful fuel is burned up, but we must sustain the reaction somehow, so we have to turn to heavier and heavier elements.
PS: Also, look for companies that defect from the marketing game which allows them to sell very high quality products for cheap. Think store brand items etc.
I don't think we are anywhere close that, nor that we can ever get there. What happened is that most low-hanging fruits of actual value got picked, to the point that sales & marketing started to have much better ROI than trying to invent and build better things. It's a gradual shift towards a zero-sum-game economy.