At Pattie’s Heart-Healthy restaurant, 520 N. Michigan Ave., you usually have to brave a lunchtime crowd to order spinach fettuccine with eggplant sauce (3 grarns of fat) or any of the other low-fat offerings.
Down the street, HeartWise Express, on the eighth floor of Chicago Place, has lines waiting for turkey-melt sandwiches (3 fat grams), black bean burritos (1 gram) or other menu items.
These quick-service restaurants are specifically designed to provide healthful alternatives to the french-fried, special-sauced, extra-crispy mania at most fast-food joints. And they fulll their niche well.
However, surveys are showing that people are confused by and tired of health messages; obesity is not a problem that’s going away.
So it hardly seems like a good climate for a fast-food chain to create an entire menu of products with half the calories and half the fat of its regular line.
A move like that takes some guts. And perhaps some real foresight.
Switch on Taco Bell’s Border Lights, eight low-calorie, low-fat products now being sold along-side regular tacos and burritos at Taco Bell.
“Consumers are overwhelmed by confusing messages,” explains Joaquin Pelaez, vice president of technology and quality for the Taco Bell Corp., “but the reality is that some people care a lot about what they are eating. So we offer them a choice.
“Taste is the key to a low-fat product. That’s what we were looking for and I think we got it. Even my 10-year-old son likes Border Lights and he could care less about low fat.”
Taco Bell, owned by Pepsico Inc., earns $4.5 billion in annual sales and has 25,000 outlets worldwide. Turning on the Lights in every one of them was no small move.
“Border Lights was not a decision entered into lightly,” Pelaez says. “We had been working on this for two years.
“We read every letter that comes to the company,” he says. “We saw that more and more customers were concerned about fat and cholesterol and (we) decided this trend was not going to go away.”
The low-fat items parallel Taco Bell’s core menu, ranging from a “Light Taco” and a “Light Burrito” with 5 and 6 grams of fat, respectively, to the heftier “Light Taco Salad” with its 25 grams of fat.
Now, 25 fat grams is not exactly heart healthy–it’s more than 35 percent of the recommended maxumum for 2,000-calorie diet.
Still, it is an improvement over Taco Bell’s regular Taco Salad which with ranch dressing can deliver up to 87 grams of fat (1 1/2 times the maximum) with 45 of it saturated. The regular cheese-laden concoetion with its fried shell (and its 55 grams of fat, of which 15.5 are saturated) has earned some strong eritieism from watchdog groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Four years ago McDonald’s put one toe into the low-fat pool when it offered the McLean Deluxe burger with 10 grams of fat (less than half that of the Big Mac). But with little advertising and no support from any other low-fat products, it bombed–accounting for less than 1 percent of sales two years after its debut.
Though McLean is still around, many thought its fate was sealed as much by its lack of taste (it was slightly more flavorful than its paper container) as its lack of promotion.
So proud was Taco Bell of the taste of its Border Lights, however, that it used them to eater a luncheon at a conference sponsored by the Washington-based consumer-nutrition group Public Voice. Most there found the tacos and burritos as good as the regular Taco Bell products, which is Pelaez’s goal.
Another company that is eatering to a desire for more healthtul food in the fast-food business is Boston Market, the new name for Boston Chieken.
One of several fast-food companies to take the old supermarket rotisserie chicken concept and sell it as a lead item, Boston Market has gone even further and added a healthy twist.
Many of Boston’s menu items are low in fat, possibly beeause they are eaten at home by a family as frequently as they’re con sumed in a restaurant. Several have less than 5 grams of fat per serving, including the 5-ounee turkey breast (1 gram) and 4-ounce chicken white meat without skin (4 grams).
But watch out for the salad. The Boston Market Caesar salad has 43 grams of fat of which 13 is saturated. Stick with zucchini marinara (4 grams).
The company has picked up another supermarket concept: selling deli-style, take-home dishes, including vegetables, salads, potatoes, rice, soups, pies, pasta, cut fruits, and other side items.
“We’re more than just chicken,” says Saad Nadhir, vice chairman of Boston Chicken Inc. (the parent company name remains unchanged). Customers look to Boston Market for home-style, healthfill products that they can carry out and serve at home, a kind of family dinner of the ’90s, he says.
FAT, BE GONE
Comparisons between Taco Bell regular itema and Border Lights:
Taco
Calories: 180;
Fat: 11g
Cholesterol: 30mg
Light Taco
Calories: 140
Fat:5g
Cholesterol:20mg
Soft Taco Supreme
Calories: 270;
Fat:15g
Cholesterol:45mg
7-layer Burrito
Calories: 540
Fat: 23g
Cholesterol: 20mg
Taco Salad
Calories: 860;
Fat 55g
Cholesterol:80mg
Light Taco Salad
Calories: 680
Fat: 25g
Cholesterol: 50mg
