Markets

Rage Against the Machine: Carl's Jr.'s and Hardee's Tout Hand-Made Food That Isn't

By Melanie Warner

Updated on: June 30, 2011 / 11:43 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

CKE Restaurants, which owns burger chains Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, has become the latest fast-food purveyor to market its fare as simple, old fashioned, grandma-style eats, when in fact it's anything but. Ads for the new Hand-Breaded Chicken Fillet Sandwich at Hardee's and Carl's feature a robot and evoke anti-industrial sentiments with the tagline, "If machines can't eat it, machines shouldn't make it."

Well, not only do machines make most of the food at Hardee's and Carl's Jr's -- as they do at most of their fast food competitors -- they make it with lots of highly processed ingredients and additives. Things like chemical preservatives, artificial food colors and azodicarbonamide, a dough conditioner that's banned in Europe and Australia and found in nearly all of CKE's bread. Even Hardee's Angus Beef Patty contains partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil and sodium phosphates, which are often used to boost water content in meat, whereas at McDonald's the hamburgers are just hamburgers.

So once again, food company marketing departments appear to be ignoring what their colleagues who actually make the food are doing. In a press release for the new campaign, Brad Haley, chief marketing officer for Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, touted the chain's efforts to appeal to a broader, more upscale customer base by improving food quality:

If you notice a pattern here, it's because we have been trying to raise the food-quality levels in the fast food industry for a number of years not, and one of the main ways we do that at Carl's Jr and Hardee's is by making food the old fashioned way.

He's right. Nothing says "old fashioned" like roast beef that's described this way:

Beef, chunked and formed, chopped beef added as binder, containing up to 8.7% solution of water, salt and sodium tripolyphosphate.

So while the hand breaded chicken isn't made in a machine -- though the meat was likely frozen in one and injected with water, salt and sodium phosphates by one -- most everything else served up by Carl's Jr and Hardee's is. It's too bad because doing a chicken sandwich that's hand-breaded in the stores using buttermilk and real eggs is a nice touch that may make the chicken taste fresher. But the promotion around it -- the robot campaign and Haley's comments -- is nothing but hype.

The lesson for food company managers is this: If you're going to tout your food as higher quality, less industrial or "old fashioned," try making sure that it is. Food quality messages are only going to work if most of your menu items aren't just like everyone else's.

And it might also be a good idea not to run ads that attack the basic premise of modern food making, which is to say the use of machines. Nearly all our food now comes from machines that hum and whiz inside of factories, even stuff that can't be attacked as overly processed, like milk, plain yogurt and the oats for oatmeal you buy in the bulk section.

But Carl's Jr and Hardee's seem intent on making a vague and cheap appeal to Americans' inherent skepticism about industrial food -- apparently hoping that people don't know enough about how their food is produced to realized that Carl's Jr and Hardee's are actually bashing themselves.

Image from CKE
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