Yes, Healthful Fast Food Is Possible. But Edible?

When my daughter was a teenager, about a dozen years ago, she went through a vegetarian phase. Back then, the payoff for orthodontist visits was a trip to Taco Bell, where the only thing we could eat were bean burritos and tacos. It wasn’t my favorite meal, but the mushy beans in that soft tortilla or crisp shell were kind of soothing, and the sweet “hot” sauce made the experience decent enough. I usually polished off two or three.

I was thinking of those Taco Bell stops during a recent week of travel. I had determined, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of airport food, to be vegan for the length of the trip. This isn’t easy. By the time I got to Terminal C at Dallas/Fort Worth, I couldn’t bear another Veggie Delite from Subway, a bad chopped salad on lousy bread. So I wandered up to the Taco Bell Express opposite Gate 14 and optimistically asked the cashier if I could get a bean burrito without cheese or sour cream. He pointed out a corner on the overhead display where the “fresco” menu offered pico de gallo in place of dairy, then upsold me on a multilayered “fresco” bean burrito for about 3 bucks. As he was talking, the customers to my right and left, both fit, suit-wearing people bearing expressions of hunger and resignation, perked up. They weren’t aware of the fresco menu, either. One was trying to “eat healthy on the road”; the other copped to “having vegan kids.” Like me, they were intrigued by a fast-food burrito with about 350 calories, or less than half as many as a Fiesta Taco Salad bowl. It wasn’t bad, either.

Twelve years after the publication of Fast Food Nation and nearly as long since Morgan Spurlock almost ate himself to death, our relationship with fast food has changed. We’ve gone from the whistle-blowing stage to the higher-expectations stage, and some of those expectations are being met. Various states have passed measures to limit the confinement of farm animals. In-N-Out Burger has demonstrated that you don’t have to underpay your employees to be profitable. There are dozens of plant-based alternatives to meat, with more on the way; increasingly, they’re pretty good.

The fulfillment of these expectations has led to higher ones. My experience at the airport only confirmed what I’d been hearing for years from analysts in the fast-food industry. After the success of companies like Whole Foods, and healthful (or theoretically healthful) brands like Annie’s and Kashi, there’s now a market for a fast-food chain that’s not only healthful itself, but vegetarian-friendly, sustainable, and even humane. And, this being fast food: cheap. “It is significant, and I do believe it is coming from consumer desire to have choices and more balance,” says Andy Barish, a restaurant analyst at Jefferies LLC, the investment bank. “And it’s not just the coasts anymore.”

I’m not talking about token gestures, like McDonald’s fruit-and-yogurt parfait, whose calories are more than 50 percent sugar. And I don’t expect the prices to match those of Taco Bell or McDonald’s, where economies of scale and inexpensive ingredients make meals dirt cheap. What I’d like is a place that serves only good options, where you don’t have to resist the junk food to order well, and where the food is real—by which I mean dishes that generally contain few ingredients and are recognizable to everyone, not just food technologists. It’s a place where something like a black-bean burger piled with vegetables and baked sweet potato fries—and, hell, maybe even a vegan shake—is less than 10 bucks and 800 calories (and way fewer without the shake). If I could order and eat that in 15 minutes, I’d be happy, and I think a lot of others would be, too. You can try my recipes for a fast, low-calorie burger, fries, and shake.

In recent years, the fast-food industry has started to heed these new demands. Billions of dollars have been invested in more healthful fast-food options, and the financial incentives justify these expenditures. About half of all the money spent on food in the United States is for meals eaten outside the home. And last year McDonald’s earned $5.5 billion in profits on $88 billion in sales. If a competitor offered a more healthful option that was able to capture just a single percent of that market share, it would make $55 million. Chipotle, the best newcomer of the last generation, has beaten that 1 percent handily. Last year, sales approached $3 billion. In the fourth quarter, they grew by 17 percent over the same period in the previous year.

Numbers are tricky to pin down for more healthful options because the fast-food industry doesn’t yet have a category for “healthful.” The industry refers to McDonald’s and Burger King as “quick-serve restaurants”; Chipotle is “fast casual”; and restaurants where you order at the counter and the food is brought to you are sometimes called “premium fast casual.” Restaurants from these various sectors often deny these distinctions, but QSR, an industry trade magazine—“Limited-Service, Unlimited Possibilities”—spends a good deal of space dissecting them.

However, after decades of eating the stuff, I have my own. First, there are those places that serve junk, no matter what kind of veneer they present. Subway, Taco Bell (I may be partial to them, but really…), McDonald’s, and their ilk make up the Junk Food sector. One step up are places with better ambience and perhaps better ingredients—Shake Shack, Five Guys, Starbucks, Pret a Manger—that also peddle unhealthful food but succeed in making diners feel better about eating it, either because it tastes better, is surrounded by some healthful options, the setting is groovier, or they use some organic or sustainable ingredients. This is the Nouveau Junk sector.

Chipotle combines the best aspects of Nouveau Junk to create a new category that we might call Improved Fast Food. At Chipotle, the food is fresher and tastes much better than traditional fast food. The sourcing, production, and cooking is generally of a higher level; and the overall experience is more pleasant. The guacamole really is made on premises, and the chicken (however tasteless) is cooked before your eyes. It’s fairly easy to eat vegan there, but those burritos can pack on the calories. As a competitor told me, “Several brands had a head start on [the Chipotle founder Steve] Ells, but he kicked their [expletive] with culture and quality. It’s not shabby for assembly-line steam-table Mexican food. It might be worth $10 billion right now.” (It is.)

Chipotle no longer stands alone in the Improved Fast Food world: Chop’t, Maoz, Freshii, Zoës Kitchen, and several others all have their strong points. And—like Chipotle—they all have their limitations, starting with calories and fat. By offering fried chicken and fried onions in addition to organic tofu, Chop’t, a salad chain in New York and Washington, tempts customers to turn what might have been a healthful meal into a calorie bomb (to say nothing of the tasteless dressing), and often raises the price to $12 or more. The Netherlands-based Maoz isn’t bad, but it’s not as good as the mom-and-pop falafel trucks and shops that are all over Manhattan. There are barely any choices, nothing is cooked to order, the pita is a sponge, and there is a messy serve-yourself setup that makes a $10 meal seem like a bit of a rip-off.

Despite its flaws, Improved Fast Food is the transitional step to a new category of fast-food restaurant whose practices should be even closer to sustainable and whose meals should be reasonably healthful and good-tasting and inexpensive. (Maybe not McDonald’s-inexpensive, but under $10.) This new category is, or will be, Good Fast Food, and there are already a few emerging contenders.

Veggie Grill is a six-year-old Los Angeles–based chain with 18 locations. Technically, it falls into the “premium fast casual” category. The restaurants are pleasantly designed and nicely lighted and offer limited service. The food is strictly vegan, though you might not know it at first.

Kevin Boylan and T. K. Pillan, the chain’s founders, are vegans themselves. They frequently refer to their food as “familiar” and “American,” but that’s debatable. The “chickin” in the “Santa Fe Crispy Chickin” sandwich is Gardein, a soy-based product that has become the default for fast-food operators looking for meat substitutes. Although there are better products in the pipeline, Gardein, especially when fried, tastes more or less like a McNugget (which isn’t entirely “real” chicken itself). The “cheese” is Daiya, which is tapioca-based and similar in taste to a pasteurized processed American cheese. The “steak,” “carne asada,” “crab cake” (my favorite), and “burger” are also soy, in combination with wheat and pea protein. In terms of animal welfare, environmental damage, and resource usage, these products are huge steps in the right direction. They save animals, water, energy, and land.

Boylan wanted to make clear to me that his chain isn’t about haute cuisine. “We’re not doing sautéed tempeh with a peach reduction da-da-da,” he said. “That may be a great menu item, but most people don’t know what it is. When we say ‘cheeseburger’—or ‘fried chickin’ with mashed potatoes with gravy and steamed kale—everyone knows what we’re talking about.” He’s probably right, and the vegetables are pretty good, too. The mashed potatoes are cut with 40 percent cauliflower; the gravy is made from porcini mushrooms and you can get your entree on a bed of kale instead of a bun.

When I first entered a Veggie Grill, I expected a room full of skinny vegans talking about their vegan-ness. Instead, at locations in Hollywood, El Segundo, and Westwood, the lines could have been anywhere, even an airport Taco Bell. The diners appeared mixed by class and weight, and sure looked like omnivores, which they mostly are. The company’s research shows that about 70 percent of its customers eat meat or fish, a fact that seems both reflected in its menu and its instant success. Veggie Grill won best American restaurant in the 2012 Los Angeles Times readers’ poll, and sales are up 16 percent in existing stores compared with last year. The plan is to double those 18 locations every 18 months for the foreseeable future—“fast enough to stay ahead of competitors, but not so fast as to lose our cultural DNA,” Boylan said. In 2011, the founders brought in a new C.E.O., Greg Dollarhyde, who helped Baja Fresh become a national chain before its sale to Wendy’s for nearly $300 million.

Veggie Grill is being underwritten partly by Brentwood Associates, a small private-equity firm that’s invested in various consumer businesses, including Zoës Kitchen, a chain that offers kebabs, braised beans, and roasted vegetables. “For a firm like us to get involved with a concept like Veggie Grill, we have to believe it’s a profitable business model, and we do,” Brentwood’s managing director, Rahul Aggarwal, told me. “Ten years ago I would’ve said no vegan restaurant would be successful, but people are looking for different ways to eat and this is a great concept.”

I admire Veggie Grill, but while making “chickin” from soy is no crime, it’s still far from real food. I have a long-running argument with committed vegan friends, who say that Americans aren’t ready for rice and beans, or chickpea-and-spinach stew, and that places like Veggie Grill offer a transition to animal-and-environment-friendlier food. On one level, I agree. Why feed the grain to tortured animals to produce lousy meat when you can process the grain and produce it into “meat”? On another level, the goal should be fast food that’s real food, too.

Much of what I ate at Veggie Grill was fried and dense, and even when I didn’t overeat, I felt as heavy afterward as I do after eating at a Junk Food chain. And while that Santa Fe Crispy Chickin sandwich with lettuce, tomato, red onion, avocado, and vegan mayo comes in at 550 calories, 200 fewer than Burger King’s Tendercrisp chicken sandwich, the “chickin” sandwich costs $9. The Tendercrisp costs $5, and that’s in Midtown Manhattan.

Future growth should allow Veggie Grill to lower prices, but it may never be possible to spend less than 10 dollars on a meal there. Part of that cost is service: at Veggie Grill, you order, get a number to put on your table, and wait for a server. It’s a luxury compared with most chains, and a pleasant one, but the combination of the food’s being not quite real and the price’s being still too high means Veggie Grill hasn’t made the leap to Good Fast Food.

During my time in Los Angeles, I also ate at Native Foods Café, a vegan chain similar to Veggie Grill, where you can get a pretty good “meatball” sub (made of seitan, a form of wheat gluten), and at Tender Greens, which, though it is cafeteria-style (think Chipotle with a large Euro-Californian menu), flirts with the $20 mark for a meal. It can’t really be considered fast food, but it’s quite terrific and I’d love to see it put Applebee’s and Olive Garden out of business.

In Culver City, I visited Lyfe Kitchen (that’s “Love Your Food Everyday”; I know, but please keep reading). Lyfe has the pedigree, menu, financing, plan, and ambition to take on the major chains. The company is trying to build 250 locations in the next five years, and QSR has already wondered whether it will become the “Whole Foods of fast food.”

At Lyfe, the cookies are dairy-free; the beef comes from grass-fed, humanely raised cows; nothing weighs in at more than 600 calories; and there’s no butter, cream, white sugar, white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, or trans fats. The concept was the brainchild of the former Gardein executive and investment banker Stephen Sidwell, who quickly enlisted Mike Roberts, the former global president of McDonald’s, and Mike Donahue, McDonald’s U.S.A.’s chief of corporate communications. These three teamed up with Art Smith, Oprah’s former chef, and Tal Ronnen, who I believe to be among the most ambitious and talented vegan chefs in the country.

According to Roberts, Lyfe currently has more than 250 angel investors who “represent a group of people that are saying, ‘We’ve been waiting for something like this.’ ” The Culver City operation opened earlier this year, and two more California locations are scheduled to open before the year is out. New York locations are being actively scouted, and a Chicago franchise is in the works.

When I visited the Culver City operation, shortly before its official opening, I sampled across the menu and came away impressed. There are four small, creative flatbread pizzas under $10; one is vegan, two are vegetarian, and one was done with chicken. I tasted terrific salads, like a beet-and-farro one ($9) that could easily pass for a starter at a good restaurant, and breakfast selections, like steel-cut oatmeal with yogurt and real maple syrup ($5) and a tofu wrap ($6.50), were actually delicious.

Lyfe, not unlike life, isn’t cheap. The owners claim that an average check is “around $15” but one entree (roast salmon, bok choy, shiitake mushrooms, miso, etc.) costs exactly $15. An “ancient grain” bowl with Gardein “beef tips” costs $12, which seems too much. Still, the salmon is good and the bowl is delicious, as is a squash risotto made with farro that costs $9—or the price of a “chickin” sandwich at Veggie Grill or a couple of Tendercrisp sandwiches at Burger King.

How in the world, I asked Roberts and Donahue, can they expect to run 250 franchises serving that salmon dish or the risotto or their signature roasted Brussels sprouts, which they hope to make into the French fries of the 21st century? Donahue acknowledged that it was going to be a challenge, but nothing that technology couldn’t solve. Lyfe will rely on digital order-taking, G.P.S. customer location—a coaster will tell your server where you’re sitting—online ordering, and mobile apps. Programmable, state-of-the-art combination ovens store recipes, cook with moist or dry heat, and really do take the guesswork out of cooking. An order-tracking system tells cooks when to start preparing various parts of dishes and requires their input only at the end of each order. Almost all activity is tracked in real time, which helps the managers run things smoothly.

Lyfe isn’t vegan, so much as protein-agnostic. You can get a Gardein burger or a grass-fed beef burger, “unfried” chicken or Gardein “chickin.” You can also get wine (biodynamic), beer (organic), or a better-than-it-sounds banana-kale smoothie. However, I fear that Lyfe’s ambition, and its diverse menu, will drive up equipment and labor costs, and that those costs are going to keep the chain from appealing to less-affluent Americans. You can get a lot done in a franchise system, but its main virtues are locating the most popular dishes, focusing on their preparation, and streamlining the process. My hope is that Lyfe will evolve, as all businesses do, by a process of trial and error, and be successful enough that they have a real impact on the way we think of fast food.

Veggie Grill, Lyfe Kitchen, Tender Greens, and others have solved the challenge of bringing formerly upscale, plant-based foods to more of a mass audience. But the industry seems to be focused on a niche group that you might call the health-aware sector of the population. (If you’re reading this article, you’re probably in it.) Whole Foods has proved that you can build a publicly traded business, with $16 billion in market capitalization, by appealing to this niche. But fast food is, at its core, a class issue. Many people rely on that Tendercrisp because they need to, and our country’s fast-food problem won’t be solved—regardless of innovation in vegan options or high-tech ovens—until the prices come down and this niche sector is no longer niche.

It was this idea that led me, a few years ago, to try to start a fast-food chain of my own, modeled after Chipotle. I wanted to focus on Mediterranean food, largely on plant-based options like falafel, hummus, chopped salad, grilled vegetables, and maybe a tagine or ratatouille. I wanted to prioritize sustainability, minimize meat, and eliminate soda, and I’d treat and pay workers fairly. But after chatting with a few fast-food veterans, I soon recognized just how quixotic my ideas seemed. Anyone with industry experience would want to add more meat, sell Coke, and take advantage of both workers and customers to maximize profits. I lost my stomach for the project before I even really began, but recent trends suggest that there may have been hope had I stuck to my guns. Soda consumption is down; meat consumption is down; sales of organic foods are up; more people are expressing concern about GMOs, additives, pesticides, and animal welfare. The lines out the door—first at Chipotle and now at Maoz, Chop’t, Tender Greens, and Veggie Grill—don’t lie. According to a report in Advertising Age, McDonald’s no longer ranks in the top 10 favorite restaurants of Millennials, a group that comprises as many as 80 million people. Vegans looking for a quick fix after the orthodontist have plenty of choices.

Good Fast Food doesn’t need to be vegan or even vegetarian; it just ought to be real, whole food. The best word to describe a wise contemporary diet is flexitarian, which is nothing more than intelligent omnivorism. There are probably millions of people who now eat this way, including me. This flexibility avoids junk and emphasizes plants, and Lyfe Kitchen, which offers both “chickin” and chicken—plus beans, vegetables, and grains in their whole forms (all for under 600 calories per dish)—comes closest to this ideal. But the menu offers too much, the service raises prices too high, and speed is going to be an issue. My advice would be to skip the service and the wine, make a limited menu with big flavors and a few treats, and keep it as cheap as you can. Of course, there are huge players who could do this almost instantaneously. But the best thing they seem able to come up with is the McWrap or the fresco menu.

In the meantime, I’m building the case that it’s possible to use real ingredients to create relatively inexpensive, low-calorie, meat-free, protein-dense, inexpensive fast food. If anyone with the desire can produce this stuff in a home kitchen, then industry veterans financed by private equity firms should be able to produce it at scale in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the price. You think people won’t eat it? There’s a lot of evidence that suggests otherwise.

APRIL 3, 2013