A New Formula For Food Franchisers

Forbes.com:

The average person, according to the experts, makes 200 food-related choices a day. Actually, make that 201 choices. Courtesy of a new campaign by a leading restaurant chain, diners who are used to choices that make their meals bigger can now actually choose to order portions that are significantly smaller.

This spring, T.G.I. Friday’s announced what it called an ‘unprecedented move in the casual dining industry’ when the restaurant chain began offering smaller portions at lower prices for select dishes.

Called the ‘right portion, right price’ menu, it includes 6 new smaller entrées - such as Asian-glazed chicken with field greens and cedar-seared salmon with pasta - and also began offering smaller portions for four of its long-standing menu favorites like shrimp Key West and baby back ribs. These ‘right portion’ menu options offer about one-third less food than the regular-size orders. The price of these ‘right portion’ meals is also about one-third less, ranging from $6.99 to $8.99 each.

According to food and marketing experts, this recent move to smaller portions by T.G.I. Friday’s, a unit of Carlson Restaurants Worldwide, reflects a convergence of restaurant marketing initiatives with growing public awareness of America’s well-documented obesity problem. Yet no matter how tempting the ‘right portion’ bistro sirloin salad or the dragonfire chicken is, the question remains: Will consumers bite? Or, in this case, bite less?

Read on…