All I want is a #$%&! Decent salad!

Can’t we innovate our way out of this fast food mess?

Every day I struggle with the tradeoff between the need to eat healthy and the logistics of eating healthy.  I wrote a post last week in one of the business groups I’m in on LinkedIn about how to eat healthy when traveling.  I saw the ex-President of McDonalds speak at a conference this week as well and was discouraged by what she had to say.

I want to dip into this some more.  Maybe one of you young entrepreneurial types will get a billion dollar idea from this.  You can send me some free meal coupons when you strike it rich.  I think there’s an opportunity for some innovation here that could change the world.

The reason fast food exists is convenience.  That’s the tradeoff.  Convenience and time for healthy eating.  People grab a cheeseburger at a fast food joint because it’s easy and it’s fast.  You can drive up and they hand it to you.  You don’t need to clean it or cook it.  You can eat it without a fork while you’re driving.  It’s easy.

This is where the healthy eating lifestyle becomes a challenge.  If you want to eat fruits and vegetables you have to find them, clean them, cook them and many are hard to eat.

Let’s take the example of a salad.  A salad is simple right?  Not so fast.

In order for me to have a salad for lunch I need to go to the grocery and get all the ingredients.  Let’s say my average salad consists of:

• Leaf Lettuce
• Kale
• Red Peppers
• Cucumbers
• Celery
• Carrots
• Broccoli
• Tomato
• Avocado
• Raw Almonds
• Homemade balsamic vinaigrette

Your ingredients might be different, but you get the idea.

That’s a rather complex meal.  Why wouldn’t I just buy it from the drive through?  You can’t get that salad from a drive through.  As a matter of fact you can’t get that salad from any place except my kitchen.

This is a multi-colored, multi-textured, whole food, health bomb! It’s good for me, filling and awesome to eat for lunch.  It’s nutrition dense and calorie low.

What do I have to do to make the salad?

I have to wash each of the component vegetables.  I have to process each of them.  To clean and prepare this list of salad components takes about 45 minutes.  Since this is a relatively fixed time whether I’m making one salad or a big pile of salad I usually make 5 days’ worth.  This is about the limit of shelf life once these components are processed and mixed.

This is where it starts to approach convenience.  Once I have it all processed I can containerize it into single serving containers.  Whether these are reusable fridge containers or plastic baggies, once the stuff is partitioned it becomes a ‘grab-and-go’ item.

But, I’m not done.

The nuts, avocados and Balsamic vinaigrette are added after the fact when it’s time to consume.

The nuts are easy.  You just grab a handful and toss them into the single serving container when the day of use arrives.  You can’t put them in ahead of time or they’ll get soggy.

Avocado and nuts in the salad add protein and good fats.  Without these components the salad will be weighted too far into the carbs side.  It won’t fill you up and will make you feel like you’re starving in the afternoon.

The avocado can’t be processed until it’s time to eat the salad.  It will go brown quickly.  Timing avocado ripeness is an art in itself.  You have to select them in the store at a ripeness that will develop to perfection as you need them during the week.  The window for use is small. Plus or minus a day on either side your avocado will be either green or mushy.

It’s an acquired art, avocado wrangling.  Avocados are not convenient food.  They need to be nurtured and timed.  I’ll buy a week’s worth on the green side and take them out of the fridge one or two a day to ripen.  If you choose them correctly they should ripen to perfection in one or two days on the counter.

Luckily the avocado comes in its own convenient packaging.  It is another grab and go item in the morning.  You have to process it when lunch time comes.  This entails pealing and cutting it up with a knife.  Not hard, but not something you can do while driving a car.

What about the dressing?  Guess what?  You can’t get that in the drive thru either.  Commercial salad dressing is a stealth way to get chemicals, unhealthy fats, sodium and processed sugar into your heretofore healthy salad.

I make my own.  What’s in it?

• Olive oil
• Balsamic (or wine or apple) Vinegar
• Garlic cloves
• Spices and herbs
• Sea salt
• Ground hot pepper

That’s how you get flavor into your salad!  Plus you get some good PH basic from the vinegar and some more good fat from the oil.

It takes about 20 minutes for me to load all this into a blender and process about a liter of dressing.  As with the salad it’s a fixed cost so I make two bottles worth.  Theoretically this dressing is shelf stable and it hasn’t killed me yet.

After processing the dressing becomes convenient.  I squirt some onto my salad in the morning, add the nuts and shake it up for that perfect lunch salad.

What’s my point?

In order to have this example of the healthy salad I’ve got a trip to the market and about an hour of fixed processing time a week.  Each day there is an incremental small bit of processing.  In terms of convenience, once I have everything prepped the salad is pretty low time-cost during the day.  This is not something that’s easy to eat while driving a car.  You need a fork and a steady hand.

The healthy food gurus would say that this time-cost is an appropriate investment in your health.  In fact what they are saying is that you should be willing to make the sacrifice and change your lifestyle to get to healthy meals.  I shouldn’t expect to be able to pick up my salad with fresh avocado, raw almonds and homemade spicy vinaigrette in a drive through.

I have a better idea.  Why don’t we meet people where they are?  Why don’t we figure out how to co-opt convenience and scale to our advantage?

What is convenience?  Convenience is getting what I want when I want it at a price I want to pay.

Can I get a salad in an airport or a drive thru today?  Sure I can but it will not be the salad I want.  It will be some sad wilted romaine lettuce with croutons and commercial dressing.  What’s the point of that?  I might as well have the cheeseburger.

Let’s meet the next generation where they are.

I propose a new fast food business.  I’m going to call it “Boom Salads”.  It comes with an app that you use to configure your salad.

You place your order online or on the phone and fresh components of your choice are processed and mixed to your preference.  Same thing with the dressing.  You essentially configure the recipe and processing requirements from a menu of choices – like I described above.

Since it will be a volume business this can all be mechanized and scaled to promote freshness.

Taking beyond the drive thru there will be a delivery option as well that comes in standardized containers that keep fresh in the office fridge.  While we’re at it we’ll create some sort of leaf or seaweed wrap so you can eat it in the car without a fork and without ruining your shirt.

Why is this harder than killing and processing a cow?  How is this more complex than processing and presenting an oil-fried potato chunk?

It’s not a convenience problem.  It’s an innovation problem. It’s a lack of will and a lack of leadership.

We have the power to shift cultural norms in a single generation.  Our grandparents smoked cigarettes.  We don’t.  Cultural norms are open to our innovation.

There is no reason this can’t be made better.

All I want is a #$@%#$ salad!