IKEA's restaurants were failing, then it turned to Swedish meatballs | Hacker News Reader

IKEA's restaurants were failing, then it turned to Swedish meatballs

cnn.com

130 pointsdanso104 comments

Has anyone been to an ikea restaurant recently? I think post-covid they made a bunch of cost-cutting changes, because I remember the food being pretty darn delightful and tasty. I went a month ago and got cold mashed potatoes, disgusting veggies, and just plain horrible mac-n-cheese. Also, all the silverware and dishes had been replaced by single-use wooden sporks and paper plates.

I'm probably never eating at ikea again. The meatballs are decent, but you can get them frozen and they taste exactly the same.

How are wooden sporks and paper plates cost-cutting? They're single use, so you need to keep buying them, whereas you can wash silverware and dishes. And they're probably the cheapest possible silverware and dishes known to man since IKEA makes them.

Sounds more like a hygiene thing than a cost-cutting thing.

IKEA doesn't make anything. Their entire competetive advantage is inventing logistics 2.0

IKEA is well-known for it's innovative designs. They're just focussed on cost-saving for the most part.

If you are in logistics, and concerned with engineering for packaging, you have to analyze IKEA. They are among the very best at that.

They are not among the very best, they literally invented it and still hold the steering wheel.

That's like saying Apple doesn't make iPhones.

Washing does require some amount of labor and water usage. We don’t get sodas in reusable bottles to return either for that reason.

We actually had that in Denmark prior to the turn of century... and basically only that or glass bottles for beverages, as cans were also banned. Now it's just like in other countries.

Bars often have returnable bottles for soda, and I occasionally see the same bottles at supermarkets. (Irma near me has Schweppes in glass bottles.)

Maybe people don't like to carry the heavy bottles around.

Also, all that glass adds substantially to the shipping weight. (almost half a kg per bottle, adds a lot of weight to a truckload of soda)

I was talking about reusable plastic bottles, though, which were washed and refilled in a similar way to glass bottles in Denmark. This was still the case in the 1990s, but it stopped at the turn of the century.

The energy to product these single-use utensils costs less than what a dishwasher person would cost with the current labor shortages, I suppose.

It is not just IKEA. Besides shrinkflation, there must be something like shitficflation, because here in C. Europe, mince and sausages became basically inedible over the past 12 years. Which is a shame as I used to enjoy both.

This is going to feel like a personal attack, but it's intended to be commiserating:

Welcome to getting old.

Is that why eating out isn’t as much fun as it used to be either?

Yes.

It also becomes increasingly expensive to find enjoyable/delightful food.

Why do I feel young again at a tiny butcher shop then? Same old good sausages as always. Although for a much higher price...

To be honest, I really took that into account. For example this crap fat (known by everyone) momma-pizza's taste has deteriorated from 8 to 6. High quality single-malt's taste has deteriorated from 7 to 5, while mince and sausages have seen such an insane drop, that they are literally no longer edible (so <3). In my childhood I'd rate them 7 or 8.

But yeah, feelings get blunt with age, not only the feelings of pleasure, but also the feelings of suffering. That's why it is much easier to run 42km at age 35 when it is literally 3 times much more difficult than at age 25..

I legit prefer the veggie meats to supermarket burgers/mince.

I think so, because we have seen inflation already in most areas of life: rising prices (and I'm thinking of pre-2022). However food has somehow more or less stayed level. Much of it means we were paying the same for ever worse quality food.

I am wondering how Costco is doing with their chickens and hot dogs.

Those were openly acknowledged to be loss-leaders even before COVID. But I wonder how long they're going to stay with their current pricing, with food prices soaring across the board. End of an era, probably.

And I have no doubt they're what holds Sam's Club pricing down too, as soon as they bump their prices so will Sam's.

If those are indeed loss leaders, what would be the reason for the addition push for the products recently? Nowadays there are Costco employees bringing pizzas to the checkout lines and trying to sell them. Are these overproductions due to a drop in demand?

My Costco has never returned to making pizzas, neither frozen nor in the "restaurant" since the pandemic started. I can't even imagine them selling pizzas in the checkout.

that's odd, I talk with a couple people about costco finds and nobody ever has had their cafes stop making pizzas.

The costco menus are nationalized though - Costco Canada for example got the Polish Dog long after it had disappeared from the US, as well as chicken strips, fries, wings, and poutine. They also apparently still get brown mustard and sauerkraut even though, again, those disappeared from the US when COVID hit. So maybe you are not in the US? But pizzas are definitely still in cafes in the US - apart from the Combo Pizza which did disappear at the start of COVID along with the brown mustard and sauerkraut (RIP my tastebuds)

https://www.sheknows.com/food-and-recipes/articles/2536803/c...

Costco Korea gets some very interesting items, including a pork cutlet, bulgogi bake, abalone porridge, and a blueberry smoothie or at least they did pre-COVID (no idea since, I don't live there).

https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-food-court-in-south-k...

Costco Japan apparently got a cheeseburger, salad in a cup, the bulgogi bake, and clam chowder.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/sfedjh/food_court_i...

The hot dog, however, is a Costco icon. One must partake in communion before leaving the Church.

I will take a look through the deli section next time I'm there, but I do agree on that one, I think the take-n-bake went away when covid hit. I can't remember noticing them since then at least, but I don't like them and don't seek them out (they're different and not as good as the cafe ones).

My store is a smaller one and is missing many of the items in the other stores 30-45 minutes away. For example, no pre-peeled garlic, no standby generators (why?! suburbanites probably would buy more home upgrades than urbanites...), a more limited selection of household goods, etc. It is up to the discretion of the manager.

I have recently seen them hawking fresh-baked artisan rolls in the entry foyer near the TVs though, so I would definitely believe they might be hawking pizzas in the checkouts as people are lined up to wait. Maybe there is a push for that from corporate, sell more made-in-store foods like that.

They probably just have some employees with a hot-bag going around being like "hot fresh pizza, take one home to the kids!" or something, and the cashier rings it up when it's your turn. That's basically what they were doing with the artisan rolls last time I was there, only (again) in the entry foyer.

> The hot dog, however, is a Costco icon. One must partake in communion before leaving the Church.

The truly devout amongst us make the sign of the cross upon entering the building.

This way you get to drink your soda as you browse the aisles and get a free refill after checkout.

I don't think pizzas or the artisan rolls (which are what I've seen) are loss leaders. Even at $10 a pie, they're probably making a buck or two. Pizza is cheap to make, so is bread.

I'd be surprised to see them hawking chickens or hot dogs in the line but who knows. Costco goes hard on customer satisfaction, that's why they offer regularly-stocked loss-leader items like that in the first place.

> here in C. Europe, mince and sausages became basically inedible

Are you referring to frozen, processed meat? In North America you can find fresh ground meat at most supermarkets and the store-made version is generally made from the butcher's trimmings e.g. steak cuts. Fresh in that it's labeled with an expiration date, at most 2-3 days from production. USDA guidelines and all that.

Ah yeah Freakonomics coined the term “skimpflation”, like how costs are the same but when you go to a hotel there’s no room service, or you go to a Denny’s and wait 2 hours for a server to even acknowledge you. Businesses are just skimping everywhere.

As someone that's worked in a few slaughterhouses and meat-production places, I'm very curious as to what you mean by "inedible".

Off flavours? Old (actually toxic, or just near it) meat? Too much bread fill? Too much fat? (from what I've had of traditional Polish meals I'm guessing that last one wouldn't be a problem)

Buy them at farmers markets not the store.

I last ate at an IKEA about a week ago. It was as-expected, on regular porcelain plates with metal utensils. The mashed potatoes were hot, but I didn't have their normal veggie mix or mac-n-cheese -- I always get the "veggie medallion" substituted in from their salmon plate.

I suppose that the most we can draw from our mutual experiences is that different IKEA restaurants are running at very different levels of quality right now. Hopefully yours was just having a bad day.

(To be fair, most cafeteria-style mac-n-cheese is disgusting. Or I just have weirdly high standards for this specific food.)

Could it be a staffing issue? In Australia, the service industry is scrambling to fill shifts as COVID hits harder post-restrictions. A restaurant might shut or offer limited service because they can't offer a level of service that would escape bad reviews damaging them for the future.

A friend told me about dishwashers at one place here getting $85/hour because they were so desperate. I'm guessing this was Sunday rates, but still.

Using recyclable plates/cutlery might help cover for that temporarily.

The whole point of the Ikea restaurant is that they are show casing a lot of their own products in there: the cutlery, plates, tables, glasses, chairs, tables, etc. are all stuff that they sell in the store as well. I think they have some variations between countries in what they offer exactly in terms of food. So, greasy/bland diner style food is what you get in the US mainly because that is what people would expect to get in a place like that in the US. Likewise, the German Ikea has some German things (I've been there). I do wonder what they would do in a place like Italy. They tend to be super picky there. Serving mac and cheese there would probably get the chef lynched.

If you violate Italian food etiquette you won't survive. I would rather tell Kim Jong-un he is fat.

"Restaurant Refuses to Grate Cheese for Customer's Seafood Dish, Calls it an 'Obscene Request"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjvdxz/restaurant-refuses-to...

We recently moved, and as is tradition here in Denmark, we ended up buying most of our big living room “look at my furniture and judge me” stuff at cool “styley” places and then the rest (and a meatball dinner) at IKEA.

I haven’t been to IKEA since I lived in a dormitory that was close to IKEA two decades ago, where the meatballs and soda-refill made for a good hangover stop, but the plate I had two weeks ago was exactly like I remembered it to be. Not great, not terrible.

I was sad that they don’t do soda refill anymore though.

Saw you're at UCSD? I'm at UCSD. Want to meet up? citizenten@tuta.io

I finally picked up a frozen bag of the famed IKEA meatballs about a year ago. As a Swedish meatball enthusiast, I was excited to try them, but honestly they were pretty disgusting--spongy, weird texture, bad flavor. Are the ones served in the cafeteria different?

My mother makes them every Christmas, just using ground pork and a packet of premixed seasoning, and they are far superior. To really go to the next level, https://www.themeateater.com/cook/recipes/wild-game-meatball... is a solid recipe that works well with ground elk meat or pork sausage.

All the meatballs I ate when I visited Sweden were fine, of course, it's just that IKEA's were bad.

I'm a Swede so I think I'm qualified to answer this. Yes the meatballs served at IKEA fits your description. They are really low quality meatballs.

Do you have a recipe you can recommend? I'd love to try making some fresh

I feel like every Swedish family has a recipe of their own that is passed down and gently modified by each generation. Here is a link to a good “baseline” which aligns very well with my family one if you remove the sugar [1]. It is in Swedish though, but translation engines tend to do a good job with “simple” text like recipes.

[1]: https://www.ica.se/recept/klassiska-kottbullar-712807 (Swedish)

Now, I prefer to have them with boiled potatoes (some prefer mashed), lingonberries (not lingonberry jam though, just boiled gently with a tiny touch of sugar and leave the berries intact if you can), pickles (we have a family recipe for that as well), and of course creamy “brunsås” gravy. Here is a baseline recipe for the gravy [2], I have never used butter myself though and make sure to make it after the meatballs so that you can use whatever flavour you have left in the frying pan as additional stock for the sauce (this is not mentioned in the recipe – despite it being gravy – and should also remove the need to add salt and pepper). I also prefer to make the gravy thick and sticky, so that it will stick to the boiled potatoes if you want to go down that route.

[2]: https://www.ica.se/recept/brunsas-720341 (Swedish)

Happy cooking!

Thankyou!

I seem to recall they used to serve Scan meatballs (well known Swedish brand) but outsourced to someone else a few years ago as a cost saving measure. Or maybe that was just in Sweden, no idea really.

I used to occasionally visit the IKEA near the Sydney airport to get sweets and biscuits from home, but last time I was there it was all home-brand stuff, not quite the same as I was hoping for.

As for the meatballs, these days I just make my own and freeze them. Homemade are always better anyway.

I mostly ate it for the gravy, which was pretty solid. The meatballs themselves were fine; their only saving grace was that you could get quite a few of them for a reasonable price, which made them attractive after checking out 50 models of bedroom furniture for 2 and a half hours.

> spongy, weird texture, bad flavor.

That describes every store bought frozen meatball I've ever had, sponginess particularly. But if I make meatballs myself and freeze them, they come out fine. Something about the way factories make meatballs just isn't right.

Is it likely to be extra breadcrumbs or similar used as a bulking agent, but with an increased ratio to cut costs?

Having eaten at IKEAs on four continents, the meatballs are prepared (semi-)locally and have wide variation in taste and texture. The ones in Australia, for example, used to be quite good until they loudly trumpeted a price reduction, probably achieved by replacing most of the meat with cardboard. In Singapore, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure one of the local extra ingredients is soy sauce.

I am Swedish and very much enjoy the meatballs at IKEA. They do not taste significantly worse than homemade or those from a fancy restaurant.

Just as a counterpoint to all the negativity in here.

(To be honest, I have never had a bad meatball. So the problem might be with me. Edit: actually, I tested plant-based meat(?)balls once. They were not good.)

As a fellow Swede, I disagree. They taste just marginally better than what I would get back in school for lunch. However, I can still enjoy them for what they are and have a plate if I drop by IKEA abroad. =)

I made Kenji's Swedish meatballs recipe recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld5cECqIFU0

If you ever want to enjoy Ikea food again, I suggest you do not make this dish. It will be an unfortunate standards-raising experience.

Wow, I hadn't seen this channel before and LOVE the authenticity and first-person POV. Thanks for sharing!

If you like this channel, Kenji has a book, The Food Lab[0] that is the only place I go for recipes now. I have a hard time eating steaks prepared at restaurants since learning how to properly cook a steak from Kenji. His writing style is also pretty hilarious, and the book is fun to read as it feels like a conversation rather than a fry recipe book.

He also has a new book called The Wok [1] but I haven’t read any of the recipes. I imagine they’ll be delicious though, and also explain the theory of HOW to cook good food rather than just tell you exactly what to do.

[0] The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393081087/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_D4... [1] The Wok: Recipes and Techniques https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393541215/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_XQ...

I’ve been cooking out of The Wok and it’s also fantastic. The technique sections have been super helpful!

He added garlic.

He made them large.

Those two things alone completely disqualify this dish as Swedish meatballs. This is heresy. He made meatballs, sure, but them things ain't Swedish meatballs.

Your definition is a bit too One True Scotsman of the meatball world for my taste.

Larger Swedish meatballs are not uncommon in restaurants (and frankly neither is garlic). Kenji's video and recipe uses a lot of nutmeg and even says they are normally eaten with potatoes and lingonberry sauce. Not sure how much more 'Swedish' you can eat your meatballs.

In Sweden, my grandparents' generation didn't even consider garlic food. It was something you had to buy at the pharmacy.

The original Swedish meatballs were flavoured with allspice, but I think most people today think allspice has an old-fashioned taste.

I am very lenient, there's a ton of things that are non-traditional about his recipe. He's missing the onions, the mustard, the cream, and the ground beef. He's also using milk and gelatin, and worcestershire sauce.

I'll even forgive the marmite which is about as un-Swedish as you can get, because he's right about its purpose. I mean, no-one is batting an eye at adding soy sauce, but that's also available in Sweden, unlike marmite.

All of these changes are fine, he's still in the territory of "Swedish meatballs" despite having deviated quite far.

But adding garlic makes it a completely different dish. It is now garlic meatballs or Italian meatballs or whatever. We're in the territory of Southern Europe now, not Sweden.

The size of the things also moves them from meatballs to frikadeller. That's Denmark, not Sweden.

So he's made Italian-Danish garlic frikadeller. Great. I'm sure they're super tasty. But they're not Swedish meatballs.

I prefer this one and find it very authentic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Wu3Bps9ic

(For those not familiar, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time is probably my favourite cooking show. Don't forget your pre-dinner mayonnaise)

FWIW, proper Swedish meatballs are made with a mix of pork and beef. Plain pork meatballs can be quite good, but they're quite different in taste and texture.

Text-only version: https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_d98a496fd4ba614d22b933772f...

Love the meatballs, including the veggie varieties, and enjoy the store on occasion. Even the article was decent, though a bit predictable.

But, woo-wee there's dozens, perhaps sixty? javascript trackers linked on that page. Thank god for no-script.

Don't think I'll be back to cnn.

I've literally gone to Ikea just to eat "Swedish" meatballs

I've gone to just buy the lingonberry jam.

Goes great with plain yoghurt if no one's ever tried it.

The hardbread and raspberry gumdrops (gelehallon) are great, too. I'll usually get Kalle's spread, but it's maybe not for everyone.

If you've ever got leftover potatoes (or mashed potatoes) I recommend making some potato pancakes AKA potatisplättar. They go absolutely perfectly with lingonberries.

I wonder how well such a type of restaurant would do on it's own, outside of an IKEA.

Basically Scandinavian 'fast food' - healthy but also very 'hearty' and simple enough for Western tastes. The brightly lit, simply decorated rooms, kind of a 'cafeteria' feel where families can eat.

Like 'Denny's' but for middle class and urbanites.

Denny's is already for the middle class, though?

> Denny's is already for the middle class

Lol what?

I can't think of anything less middle-class than a Denny's?

>I can't think of anything less middle-class than a Denny's?

American middle class means $40k and living paycheck to paycheck.

That's shrinkflation of middle class, basically. At this pace, middle class in 50s will be your own tent under a good bridge.

It's funny - in the UK I think we'd say the middle class is getting smaller but the standard is staying the same, while in the US you look at it as the middle class stays the same size but the standard falls. Different approach to social statistics!

Depends on where you live. Minimum wage workers make ~$30k a year near me. Well north of that if the are tipped since min wage is the same for tipped and untipped workers.

I would never consider minimum wage middle class.

Neither. From my experience, Denny's was a fairly horrible experience. We benchmarked it as the lowest end.

Depends on where you live. The Denny's in the Agoura/Thousand Oaks part of metro Los Angeles were always nice upper middle class restaurants when I was there visiting. The Denny's in the southern states on the other hand tended to be much lower scale.

The middle class may be visiting Denny's at 2am but if they are going there for a dinner before a movie, those people ain't middle class.

Waffle House, or maybe lower class, but it’s enjoyed by a lot of middle class.

I love Waffle House and Denny's but they are a bit 'working class' in taste - giant dishes, a bit greasy etc..

I mean - I have nothing against and if I'm travelling or drunk it's the 'best in the world'...

But it's not going to work for college educated, 'green', progressive kids, it's a bit 'off brand'.

For example 'Chipotle' - that's a modern chain - it's 'clean' food, simple, authentic, not hugely expensive.

Basically, 'Swedish Chipotle': clean, healthy, quick, inexpensive, simple.

The term "healthy" is obviously pretty meaningless, but I would not say that meatballs, mashed potato and brown sauce is healthier than pizza or steak or something.

It matters. Pizza has a huge amount of cheese and with burgers you have 'fries' which are deep fried. Meatballs and potatoes with veg are a bit more healthy. It's also the other things: Ketchup is full of sugar etc.

Cheese is not inherently unhealthy and the meatballs are also (deep?) fried. And the brown sauce is made from cream.

In my country every morning retired boomers go to IKEA to have breakfast and they spend the entire day there. After care homes were abolished that's were they went. It's cheap, warm, safe and for some reason IKEA puts up with them.

When I was in the US, they (Greatest Generation) were in the fast food places from morning onwards.

I'm a fan of ikea's vegan hotdog, served at the restaurant.

They also sell them frozen, and I buy like 5 packs of them along with the granola and muesli which I'm also a big fan of.

They serve them with mashed potato - in which markets? In the UK they are/were served with whole (peeled) steamed/boiled potato.

I just ate a plate with mash (very generous portion) last weekend, here in south England. The other choice was chips.

I've not lived in an Ikea Market since 2010, so perhaps a change. I always just quite liked the non-mashed option.

>I've not lived in an Ikea Market since 2010, so perhaps a change.

znkynz has had the answer to homelessness all along.

In Belfast it's mash or chips with the meatballs.

At least Sweden.

The first picture, showing the advert outside an Ikea in Sweden, says "meatballs with mashed or boiled potatoes".

IKEA's food has always tasted like hospital cafeteria food/plane food to me. Really bland, low quality stuff. I'd rather get an Italian meatball sub somewhere. Or Swedish meatballs from a Swedish relative.

IKEA's desserts are OK though.

Same. A few years ago was my first Ilea trip. I was excited to try their meatballs. They were terrible. As was their coffee (but I’m admittedly a bit of a coffee snob).

The food was pretty good when I had it. Maybe they're sourcing from different distributors? Would be weird for a food operation of that size, but the stories here are not tracking.

"Swedish meatballs" are really Turkish meatballs. Just sayin'.

The only source for that seems to be a retracted claim of the official Swedish Twitter account.

https://twitter.com/swedense/status/992396766808035329

Meatballs are pretty common all over the world and many cultures have their own variants. The Swedish ones are quite similar to the ones in the rest of the Nordics, apart from their smaller size. I suspect there's as many recipies as there are grandmothers.

G'Kar describes it well in Babylon 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVLkxSSvegc

r/unexptectedBabylon5

Though with the topic it's pretty expected.

Alex has a series about it: https://youtu.be/JViMCRQ4f44

Well, guess I'm making Köttbullar for dinner this week!

Based on what evidence?

Always hard to prove things in deep history but: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/03/europe/swedish-meatballs-turk...

" King Charles XII took the throne in 1697 at age 15 and later spent several years in Bender (now Bendery in Moldova), which was under Turkish rule, before returning to Sweden in 1715 – allegedly with a recipe for meatballs. "

(allegedly)

"Coffee beans and stuffed cabbage were also brought back to Sweden by Charles XII, according to Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu. "

I would believe that the concept of meatballs came from Turkey, but I wouldn't agree that that makes Swedish meatballs actually Turkish. That kind of thinking is found a lot with strong nationalists etc as a way to claim superiority, and even aside from that, it's too reductive. Swedish meatballs are clearly their own dish with unique customs and associations. Every culture has things that originated in or were influenced by things from other culture, but that doesn't mean that they are one and the same.

Hard to believe that rolling minced meat into a spheric shape and frying them has only been invented once.

Aren't you clever? Good job!

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