DON’T HAVE A COW, MAN
Restaurants See Little Fallout From Mad Cow Scare
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
Talk about delicate timing.
In early December, Aliso Viejo-based Johnny Rockets Group Inc. launched a promotion pushing its latest creation: the double bacon cheddar hamburger.
Just weeks later, the beef industry was hit with a public relations nightmare.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy,also known as mad cow disease,and recalled thousands of pounds of U.S. beef.
The restaurant chain, which has the tagline, “The Original Hamburger,” acted fast.
JP Schuerman, Johnny Rockets’ spokesman, said the company contacted its beef suppliers and “went through a rigorous checklist to ensure the quality of their beef.”
It stuck with its promotion.
“(The mad cow scare) has had zero effect,” Schuerman said. “In fact, Johnny Rockets’ hamburger sales are up and have been for the last six weeks.”
One of the leading sellers: the double bacon cheddar burger, Schuerman said.
Scientists say there is virtually no chance that the infected cow will cause a human to be hit with a variant of the brain-wasting disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Still, the mad cow scare has OC restaurants watching everything closely.
Most say there hasn’t been any big shift in what people are ordering.
“We haven’t seen any change,” said John Allegretto, vice president of supply chain management at San Clemente-based Pick Up Stix, which is owned by Dallas-based Carlson Restaurants Worldwide Inc. “We knew it was only a matter of time that we’d see some sort of mad cow come to the U.S., and we’ve been prepared for it.”
The restaurant chain inked a memo for its managers to help them reassure guests about its beef, Allegretto said.
But few folks were asking.
Same at Newport Beach-based Ruby’s Diner Inc., which also armed its managers with answers for potentially nervous guests, said Lowell Petrie, Ruby’s vice president of marketing.
“You never really know how the consumer is going to act,” Petrie said. “But it seems to be a non-issue.”
“To date, we’ve seen very little change in our guests’ reactions,” Petrie said. “Our sales haven’t been negatively impacted.”
Customer questions also have been “sporadic” at Irvine-based Claim Jumper Enterprises Inc., according to spokesman Larry Bill.
Perhaps owing to what is a sensitive subject for restaurants, several restaurant chains didn’t return calls or declined to comment for this story.
Restaurant operators that did talk said that news reports, which have reflected the beef industry view that the meat supply is safe, have helped prevent public panic and kept beef orders rolling.
“The typical Del Taco customer is much like the typical American and isn’t reacting without considerably more information, since the U.S. Department of Agriculture has stated that this is a minor occurrence,” said Barbara Caruso, spokeswoman for Lake Forest-based Del Taco Inc. “Each week, Del Taco serves more than 2 million customers, and in the past three weeks we have not seen any changes in customer habits.”
Santa Ana-based Wahoo’s Fish Taco hasn’t seen a drop in sales of steak dishes since the mad cow case was identified, according to Ed Lee, director of planning for the taco chain. In fact, the company has posted an overall sales increase, versus a year earlier.
But Lee said it’s hard to tell if Wahoo’s received an “additional bump” in sales from people wanting beef alternatives. That’s because sales typically rise after the holidays.
A bright spot in the mad cow scare: OC restaurant operators hope to see a break in beef prices come February.
“If beef prices go down, we’d benefit,” Caruso said. “But we haven’t seen that yet.”
