Eli5: how do fast food franchises keep their recipes a secret and food tasting the same at different locations?
In: Economics
The seasoning arrives pre-mixed and portioned, so the only ones who know the actual recipe are the ones who set the ratios in the packing machines.
Or it’s all seasoned in a factory and frozen, then the restaurant is only responsible for heating.
Or, since every store sources their ingredients from the same place, the recipe isn’t secret at all and it’s just the consistency of the ingredients which maintains uniformity.
Via a commissary, basically a large factory that makes the food (or prepares the food/ingredients). For major chains like McDonalds, all their food comes either pre-mixed, pre-portioned, or at least the spice mix is already prepared. None of them actually make the food from scratch 100% like you’d expect a restaurant (in fact, even restaurants don’t make all their food 100% from scratch).
Chains like McDonalds also train for workers to do precisely the same movement or same cooking. There’s no “cook with your feelings” going on. Everything has a timer. Same ingredients + same cooking method makes taste consistent across all branches.
As for keeping recipes secret, that’s also why commissaries are there. With only one (or a few hundred) locations to consider, it’s significantly easier to lock down trade secrets vs inspecting and considering security for 13,000 stores.
Part of that comes from getting certain sauces from bags or bottles that won’t include the ingredients needed to make that sauce. Beef patties aren’t made from scratch, I have no idea what Whataburger does to make their beef patties taste different from Wendy’s or McDonald’s. As for tasting the same, that comes down to all product being prepared in one big ass kitchen where the company would have better ability to control to consistently of the quality. Then you ship it to the stores and bam employees assemble everything into a sandwich
Well practically everything is prepared in a few distribution centers, which then supply all the restaurants in the region.
There is practically no cooking taking place in the restaurants themselves. They only assemble the precooked pieces to form the different combinations.
And the distribution centers also receive shipments of stuff like spice mixes already done at different locations.
The recipes being secret is just partially the result of using a distributed system where everyone just works on their own small part of it with very few people needing to have an understanding of the whole.
and 3 Ring Binders.
Many years ago I worked as a Trainee Assistant Manager for a BBQ chicken place. I didn’t last very long, the 52 hour weeks got to me. Part of my duties were to read the entire shelf of 3 ring binders during my meal breaks. This included stuff like exactly what colour the chips were supposed to be, with colour photos to demonstrate. How long things were supposed to be cooked for. How often things were meant to be cleaned, How to go about safely filtering oil from the chip fryer to the chicken patty fryer and then the following day to the pineapple fritter fryer.
This is how fast food places ensure consistent product across all of their stores. By clearly documenting every aspect of how those stores are supposed to be run and how the product is to be produced.
To give you an example we used to salt chickens the day before they went into the ovens. The chickens are placed onto spit rods five at a time and there are six spit rods per oven. The amount of salt to be placed on the chickens is rigidly controlled. If we had any salt left over in the salt shaker after salting six spit rods worth of chickens then we got into trouble. Because we weren’t putting enough salt on the skin of the bird and the product wasn’t going to be consistent, sufficiently red, with the other stores.
To give you another example we once had a visit from the CEO of the company. He walked in and had one of our kitchen hands put a batch of chips into the fryer for the regulated 180 seconds. As they came out he took a look and announced that they were too light in colour. He directed the store manager to call the supplier and there was a rep at the store within 30 minutes to explain why their chips weren’t producing the desired result in the allocated time frame. Something to do with the amount of sugar in the potato’s varying throughout the year. We started cooking our chips for 185 seconds after that. The 3 ring binder was opened up and the colour card for the chips was waved around.
Essentially consistent produce is produced by about 10-15 great big thick 3 ring binder manuals of how to do just about everything inside the store,
Something to also consider there are no secret recipes. There isn’t a single restaurant item that doesn’t have a copycat recipe on the internet. Now you might not be able to make it well, or the recipe you choose might be a dud. Overall though secret recipes are more of a marketing gimmick than a real thing. “oh we’re special and we do something out competitors don’t” is a business line that’s been going on since the dawn of time.
The first part isnt really as big a concern as you might think. For a lot of the big franchise restaurants, McDonalds being the prime example, their recipes are not really that valuable. The secret recipe thing is good marketing but I could make a big mac, there are dozens of recipes online for it, McDonalds doesnt give a shit. Because what I couldnt do is make over 2 million big macs across 100 different countries a day and have them all taste basically the same. McDonalds most valuable asset by far is their supply chains, and they are extremely picky about that. If you can get a supply contract with them, you have a great income source for a long time, but jf the product theyre getting from their suppliers isnt to their standards, they will refuse it and move to a different supplier because they know how valuable of a customer they are
The secret ingredient in Macdonald a hamburger is cellulose plant fiber. That’s the main reason the recipe is a secret, because no one would eat there if it wasn’t.
Burger King could copy a McDonald’s hamburger but there’s no point. You want to differentiate your product from the competition, not sell yourself as copying them. If you are going to copy someone as a strategy, copy the tastiest burger not the most mass produced. McDonald’s is not as good as five guys or non chain restaraunts . But they are more expensive to make.
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