Hardee's builds a better burger

Let’s be honest – most fast food burgers rely on the fixin’s to deliver some taste bud payoff. The “special sauce” is the real hero. I mean you can measure the thickness of the meat patty at between an eighth and a quarter of an inch – thinner than the sliced tomato and only slightly thicker than the lettuce. If these things had to be labeled, government regulations would mandate something like bread product with lettuce, tomato, pickles and. . .meat. I think the realization that the “meat of the matter” really is the meat drove a few QSR’s to offer doubles and triples.

Hardee’s, on the other hand, decided to get thick. Thickburgers, to be precise. It was a decision made in 2003 that was assailed by food Nazis as irresponsible and the culinary equivalent of porn. Customers (or guests as Hardee’s management likes to call them) elbowed such nonsense aside and grabbed the new, improved burgers by the truck load. They created a sales improvement that was measured in double digits.

Eric Peterson, R&D Director at Hardee’s knew the burger chain was in trouble several years ago. “Perception of our burgers had slipped so far, people were as likely to think of us for our (Roy Rogers) fried chicken as they were for our burgers.”

Realizing that Hardee’s was still a burger chain, not KFC, he made some serious menu changes. Basically, he tossed out the existing menu and started from scratch.

Peterson changed everything from the bun to the bacon. The beef was the biggest improvement, though, as he demanded the non-descript quarter-pounder that was going down the drain for them be left to some other well-known competitor. Hardee’s would bulk up to premium Angus third-pound and half-pound patties. The phrase “low fat,” which has become code for “no taste” for many people, was banished from the menu and their advertising.

What Peterson and the rest of the foodies at Hardee’s were doing was catering to their core audience – single, male and hungry. Let the tree-hugging lettuce eaters go elsewhere. This was a place for manly men; the sports-loving, beer-drinking, burger-chomping hard hats that do blue collar labor and are damn proud of it.

Hardee’s wasn’t worried about the veto vote – the ability of a dieting woman to nix a trip to their restaurant because there wasn’t a salad with lo cal dressing on the menu or a child to demand someplace with a kids meal. They understood market segmentation better than most and grabbed an under-served chunk of the fast food business with very little competition. It was a highly bankable decision.