Rotisserie chicken

Sometimes a whole product line blows right by you without real notice.  Yet those machines are everywhere and they have been out there for decades and sell one awful lot of chickens.  As this makes clear they create the bottom rung in pricing and food service.

It also says a lot for the power of public demand, when an actual loss leader stays the course for decades. This is not a special on toilet paper that lasts a week and then sends you back to sharp pricing.  This product simply pulls in the customers and not having it will lose a significant number of customers.  It is actual proof of the power of the strategy.

So enjoy, knowing that you are really been subsidized. 

I do think that the time has arrived for the advent of true truck selling that delivers directly from producer to curbside.  My reason for that is that the retailers have long since adopted price rotation in order to drive their prices up.The farmers get nothing from this.  They have used this recently to drive potato prices up to $1.00 per pound which happens to be absurd when farm gate pricing for potatoes is likely around fifteen cents and sold in 100 pound sacks.  A farmer could easily curb those sacks at twenty five dollars and smaller measures for 35 cents.

Uber service even provides a possible template here to convert into a curbing business.
 
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Rotisserie chicken

November 01, 2018

Turn, turn, turn

The idea of roasting meat slowly over a heat source is prehistoric, and cultures all over the world have figured out fabulous ways to do it with chickens. But the modern-day rotisserie renaissance—cheap birds in take-home containers at supermarkets and big-box stores—can be traced back to the early ‘90s, when Boston Market (then Boston Chicken) started selling them at drive-thrus. 

The concept was an instant hit. From grocery store chains to infomercial kings, companies moved quickly to capitalize on the hot trend. In fact, so many rushed into the space in the late ‘90s, industry leaders went bankrupt and “bird” became a byword for an overcooked IPO. 

But, the dish survived, and in 2017, Americans purchased no fewer than 625 million rotisserie chickens in supermarkets. Megastore Costco, which markets a cult favorite, sells 60 million annually. What is it about rotisserie chicken that keeps it in the rotation? Let’s dig in.

By the digits

4: Hours a rotisserie chicken can spend on the shelf before drying out
29%: Decrease in price of Whole Foods’ rotisserie chicken after Amazon took over in 2017
414: Size in acres of Costco’s new rotisserie chicken facility in Fremont, Nebraska
$0.15: Savings per pound from buying Costco rotisserie chicken versus cooking a chicken at home
460: Milligrams of sodium in a Costco chicken, thanks to saline-flavor injections
11,415: Followers of the Costco Rotisserie Chicken Facebook page

Million-Dollar Question

Why are rotisserie chickens so cheap? 

Ranging from $4.99–$7.99 for a whole bird, rotisserie chickens are famously budget friendly. Time-strapped consumers in need of a quick meal can potentially spend less on a whole, cooked chicken than they would spend on a combo meal from a fast food chain. When you consider that the average price for a single chicken breast is $3.19 per pound, how are grocery stores and wholesalers making money by selling the whole shebang—prepared—for just a couple of dollars more?

The answer: They’re not. Rotisserie chickens are usually considered loss leaders, an item that the store purposely loses money on. Offering a popular item at a shockingly low price brings customers into the store, where they buy complementary products and impulse items. “If they get a chicken, a salad, and maybe they pick up a bottle of wine—now we’re really talking,” Don Fitzgerald, vice president of merchandising at Mariano’s, a Kroger-owned grocery chain in Chicago, told the Wall Street Journal. 

How much do stores actually lose by pricing their poultry so low? In 2015, Costco’s chief financial officer, Richard Galanti, estimated that the company “eats” $30 to $40 million annually by refusing to raise prices by just $1.


Future of Business Intelligence 

Businesses dictate how well we live. We need them to make informed decisions, so that they can best serve us. That’s why business intelligence—the practice of drawing insights from data to inform strategy—can have a direct effect on our lives. The more intelligent our businesses are, the better our lives are.

Quotable

Jerry: Look at the size of that neon light.
Kramer: [Kenny] Rogers can’t sell chicken around here, we got chicken places on every block.
Jerry: He is the gambler.
—Seinfeld, “The Chicken Roaster,” Season 8, Episode 8

brief history

The rotisserie bubble 

1985: Boston Chicken, now Boston Market, is founded in Newtonville, Massachusetts
1991: Country singer Kenny Rogers and former KFC owner John Y. Brown Jr. open Kenny Rogers Roasters
1993: Boston Market goes public at $20 a share
1994: Costco and Kroger offer rotisserie chicken
1996: Boston Market’s shares hit $46
1997: Shares of Boston Market fall 82% over the year
1998: Boston Market and Kenny Rogers Roasters go bankrupt
2000: McDonald’s buys Boston Market for $174 million
2008: Malaysian company Berjaya Roasters buys Kenny Rogers Roasters for $4 million
2011: Berjaya reports $100 million in earnings over 140 KRR locations in Asia
2017: Boston Market is rumored to be for sale for $400 million


Counting their chickens

Costco’s poultry push 

Costco is so serious about maintaining that rock-bottom $4.99 price on its rotisserie chickens that it’s investing $275 million to build a dedicated facility in Fremont, Nebraska. The plant will employ 800 people and process 2 million chickens every week. To supply the staggering number of birds, Costco is contracting with 100-125 area farmers, many of whom will switch from grain to poultry to accommodate the wholesale giant. 

Despite the massive scale, the Nebraska plant is expected to fulfill just 40% of Costco’s rotisserie chicken needs—which would feed “roughly… the western half of the United States, Alaska and Hawaii,” according to a spokeswoman for the Costco-owned company that’s managing the build. The facility should be up and running by September 2019.

Fun fact!

In 2011, Canadian chain restaurant Swiss Chalet launched a 24-hour rotisserie chicken channel for customers in Ontario. The 13-week broadcast consisted entirely of a loop featuring 12 chickens rotating on a rotisserie.

Pro Tip

How to choose your chicken wisely 

When you’re choosing a chicken from the warming case, you no doubt know to check the sticker for the time it was removed from the rotisserie. But according to Bon Appétit, there are a few other ways to ensure you get the best chicken of the bunch:
Heavy is good. A weightier chicken indicates that it still contains plenty of juices.
Pick the plump one. Pruney, shriveled chicken = dry. Look for evenly browned skin that’s still taut.
Seeing is believing. If the store hasn’t placed the cooked birds near the rotisserie so that you can see them being freshly cooked, be sure to ask how often they rotate the stock.
This one weird trick!
Spit roasting—without the spit
As Karen Klein shows at Priceonomics, at most places (Costco notably excepted) those cheap rotisserie chickens are still a bit more expensive than cooking at home. If you want a similar taste from your oven, Epicurious shows how to do it using a rack and pan.
Watch this!
This RonCo Showtime Rotisserie infomercial is sure to remind you exactly how much nonsense TV you watched during the ‘90s and early 2000s. Act now and you’ll also get Ron’s newest invention, the RonCo “Solid Flavor Injector”!
KFC
Kentucky fried fool's gold
No one was immune to the charms of rotisserie chicken when it took off in the 1990s—not even those who built their fortunes on the fried alternative. In 1993, KFC launched “The Colonel’s Rotisserie Gold,” which one executive described as, “a little like M.C. Hammer becoming an opera singer. We may be cooking it differently, but we’ve got 54 years of making the world’s favorite chicken.” Solid comparison.
The $100-million investment didn’t exactly pay off—by 1996, the “Rotisserie Gold” line had been replaced by another non-fried item dubbed “Tender Roast.”