How France Became the New El Dorado of Fast Food

HASNear this Bayonne roundabout, where Kwik Restaurant reopened its counter a month ago, you still have to wait about an hour at the wheel before getting your price. “Victims of our success,” apologizes the manager of the brand that turned back from Devil Vowert after being devoured by the largely ogre Burger King.

Two hundred kilometers further east, at Popeyes, in the suburbs of Agen, refueling is now much easier than at lunchtime. Not spinach on the menu at this fast food restaurant, which recently opened in a shopping area with thousands of others like it, but fried chicken in all sauces, especially Cajun. A very neat New Orleans-style decor and jazzy atmosphere for this…

HASNear this Bayonne roundabout, where Kwik Restaurant reopened its counter a month ago, you still have to wait about an hour at the wheel before getting your price. “Victims of our success,” apologizes the manager of the brand that turned back from Devil Vowert after being devoured by the largely ogre Burger King.

Two hundred kilometers further east, at Popeyes, in the suburbs of Agen, refueling is now much easier than at lunchtime. Not spinach on the menu at this fast food restaurant, which recently opened in a shopping area with thousands of others like it, but fried chicken in all sauces, especially Cajun. Despite having 4,000 restaurants elsewhere in the world, this franchise has a neat New Orleans-style decor and jazzy atmosphere that is almost unknown to the general public.

In the wake of Paris and Brest, it is in the heart of Gascony that the American has set the table again after the first failed French foray in 2018, this time promising to open a new address every week. And thus ruffling the feathers of its competitor KFC, while Wendy’s with its Square Steaks – the world’s third largest fast food chain – is the latest incarnation of the style revealed here.

“Everybody Goes”

While the next few weeks will see our skies full of Michelin stars (winners on March 18), here in France is a completely different reality of gastronomy. Whatever our complex of global superiority with burgers, kebabs, bagels, naan, tacos, pizza, burritos, wraps, nachos and other poke bowl “fast food” with all its sauces, France is in it and thus becoming an artifact.

With a total of more than 52,500 establishments compared to just 13,000 20 years ago, we are the second largest contributor in the world to McDonald’s and France for its two million daily customers, behind the United States. All brands combined, and despite the mostly reasonable average bill (€11.70), it is also here that it remains the highest. “The restaurant generates two to three times more turnover than any other place on Earth,” recognizes one Popeyes manager. Paradoxical and because the burger multinationals didn’t pick a random country of good food to declare war there again.

Three-quarters of Generation Z work between meals

According to ANSES (1), these perceived junk food victims agree, 55% of working adults and students visit a fast food restaurant at least once a month, two out of ten more than once a week. A question of taste, but also a question of changing eating and business habits, when the lunch break is sometimes reduced to its bare minimum. Thus, while one in two meals eaten away from home is now at fast food, three-quarters of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2010) work between meals.

For those who conclude here by painting the typical profile of a “fast-fooder,” let us all agree that the matter is more sociologically complex. At McDonald’s, like most of its competitors, long hair, white hair, suits and ties, and tracksuits. And Julie, 19, wonders about the meaning of this question: “Who goes to McDonald’s? Well, everybody” (2). Banish it, nearly half a century later by discreetly sliding it between two brioche buns, biting into a burger is no longer the original, original, rebellious act it once was. For former young people who have become parents without becoming obese, the Big Mac Proust is perfect for Madeleine.

Geopolitically, fast-food France – where you can still eat for a meal – is, on the other hand, a reflection of a certain poverty. Sometimes the last piece of this cream pie is “living with” when, in the suburbs, the local kebab shop is also the last business in the neighborhood. According to a study by the expert firm CHD Expert-DataEssential, it should be noted that only 6.8% of fast food establishments belong to large chains.

Upmarket?

But let’s get back to Agen and our chickens, Bretons and drums. In the mouth, the impression left by Popeyes’ “Chicken Deluxe” (€7.45) isn’t bad – a little less cardboardy and sweet, one might even say, than the competition. By grace, rather than fat, this move upmarket was promised here and there by certain observers? Loïc Bienassis, an ardent historian of junk food, doubts it, and prefers first to explain this sentiment by hypothesizing a decline in quality in traditional catering.

More than just customers falling into their mouths, giants of the discipline now lack space—at least in strategic locations. From historic city centers to the depths of our countryside, passing through the El Dorado of peripheral areas, where McDonald’s – 25 new restaurants every year – and company flock like starving people to the tiniest business district. Sometimes other knives risk breaking their teeth. Daunted by his first return trip to France, Popeyes, this time warns that he may fall back in part on a few “dark kitchens” (kitchens without restaurants open to the public) and their deliveries.

“We’ve become a ring where big brands come to challenge each other.”

“Why do they all come here? Adrian Pedrazzi, president of the Union of Hotel Trades and Industries (UMIH) in Lot-et-Garonne, worries in turn. “Because it’s cheaper than rue Sainte-Catherine in Bordeaux. We have become a ring where big brands challenge each other. And this makes it increasingly difficult for small local restaurants to survive. »

A sign of the times, when the former CEO of McDonald’s France recalls local elected officials “once fled like the plague”, it is the first deputy of the mayor of Agen in person that we find today at the head of the city duo. Burger Kings.

(1) National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety.

(2) France has about 1,550 McDonald’s, 500 Burger King, 330 KFC, many O’Tacos and about 120 Kwik.