I’m a bit late on the uptake here, since it’s been on the menu for over 2 weeks now, but the best Marketing Non-Secret we heard about last October was the Veggieburger which has now debuted in Germany.
There are a lot of vegetarians in Germany, and several years ago McDonald’s offered a larger vegetarian burger, the Gemüse-Mac, which had a small but loyal fan base. However, it just didn’t sell well enough to fit into the production system. Either they were made to order, meaning you had to wait 6 minutes at a minimum, or the sandwiches were held well over the 10 minute holding limit, and you can imagine how that tasted (not good).
In the meantime McDonald’s here has implemented a made-to-order system (BOP in McJargon) for deep-fried products, so we can now better offer a fresh but low-selling product. And the market for vegetarian sandwich is still there and growing, particularly among young women, and vegetarians cannot live on salads and french fries alone.
The new Veggieburger now headlines the relaunched SMS line, along with the Cheeseburger and the Chickenburger. The deep-fried patty is based on potatoes, with carrots, red bell peppers, corn and onions, with a creamy sauce, lettuce and cheese. It’s not a low-calorie sandwich. The calories per 100g (250) is the same as the Cheeseburger, but the Veggieburger is 20% heavier so has more total calories (360 vs. 300). It tastes alright, I think, although when I have 300 calories to spare on a snack I’d personally take a Cheeseburger.
As businesspeople we’re happy with how the product is starting out. Sales are in the neighborhood of the Hamburger, and it’s attracting a target group that wouldn’t be so inclined to visit us. The price of 1.10€ means we’ve broken the 1€ barrier, and we can see how the guests react.
There are no TV spots yet for the Veggieburger, but it’s pictured briefly in this cute spot for SMS. Even for non-German speakers, I think the dialog is clear (the father is going to McDonald’s and asks if she wants anything). Don’t think the spot would fly in the States, though…
If even my mother says that my blog hasn’t been updated for a while, it must be time to write something. Here are the headlines from the past couple of weeks.
My birthday (48) came and went. Another year older and deeper in debt.
We’ve had snow and ice in the Hamburg area for 7 weeks straight now, the longest anyone can remember. Even the newspapers are sick of it. The road departments have long run out of salt and sand, so the streets and sidewalks are horrible. We hear temperatures might get back above freezing at the end of the week.
The cold weather means our restaurant sales are way below plan. We figure the snow has cost us 40K€ in sales and counting, especially in Dibbersen which is only reachable by car. Our lobby furnace has needed constant attention, and just today the water pipes leading to the McCafé froze solid.
Christopher’s midterm grades were good (solid Bs, or since they use numbers here, solid 2s). Since elementary school ends after the 4th grade in our state, we have to choose a secondary school for next year. He was recommended for the Gymnasium, the academic track. There is no secondary school in Jesteburg, so we have several nearby schools to choose from.
(That title should attract attention!) Or, A Different Kind of Dollar Menu.
We’ve been giggling about this story all day, but this was a nearby restaurant. If it were one of ours we wouldn’t think it was so funny. I won’t quote the brand or location to protect the innocent.
Quick translation: “Male strip tease starts fight in fast-food restaurant. According to police a fight broke out Monday evening with a 30-year-old injured with pepper spray. A young man had dropped his pants. At 11:35 several young men entered the restaurant. As a 20-year-old admitted he didn’t have enough to pay for his order, the 27-year-old female cashier told him ‘you can strip for it’. The young man pulled down his pants. The cashier’s boyfriend (waiting for her in the lobby) did not find that funny at all, and attacked the young man. In the resulting tumult the 30-year-old was sprayed in the eye, and both sides filed assault charges with the police.”
I asked this question on Twitter and got a lot of guesses, so I’ll try it here for the blog crowd.
In February we’re about to start another coffee cup giveaway with our McMenüs (Value Meals). Even though the cup is free, we have to adjust our Value Added Tax (similar to sales tax) programming in [...]
Time to bring PapaScott into the new decade (if you believe decades begin in ‘0 years and not ‘1 years, that is). I was going to write about how this is the first new year in business that we weren’t rushing around with new things, but I guess it’s a bit late for that now.
Christopher turns 10 today! He celebrated with a breakfast of pancake cake with whipped cream and strawberry jam á la Pettson and Findus and continued with the construction of the LEGO Emerald Night, which took just 2 hours. Next step is to motorize!
Merry Christmas from Frauke, Scott and Christopher!
As usual I arranged for our Christmas cards for the US to be printed and mailed by cardstore, saving time and postage. The typewriter picture from last February is our favorite this year. Here’s the printed message from inside… nothing new for our regular readers.
I’ve been in Germany too long to be really shocked by anything anymore, but last night I had to let my jaw drop. Christopher was watching the Disney-owned TV channel SuperRTL, which was showing a Christmas special from the cartoon “Recess”. According to the German dub, this boy was dressed as a “Christmas Tree” (screenshot [...]
A tweet yesterday from Dave Winer reminded me that online blogging service editthispage.com opened to the public on that date in 1999, 10 years ago, thanks to Dave and his company at the time, Userland Software.
Which means that today, a day later (due to the time difference between California and Germany), www.papascott.de is 10 years [...]
We’ve never gotten in the habit of celebrating American Thanksgiving here in Germany, but as I mentioned on Twitter today, by coincidence we are going out for a traditional meal this Thanksgiving evening. The local Wirtschaftsrunde (chamber of commerce, sort of) is holding their annual Grünkohl dinner. I’ve never had it, and I suspect that [...]
Since we’re being nostalgic this month, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that, how about we go even further back, to November 1979. The Iran hostage crisis had just begun on November 4, but I can’t recall any of the other events. A month later, the Who Concert tragedy and the Soviet [...]
I promised that as the marketing initiatives we learned about at our franchisee meeting in October were released, I’d mention them here. Has anyone noticed the new initiative, or more correctly, the old initiative that was rebranded this week?
Back to my letter codes: S is for “SMS”. The value menu segment (the German equivalent of [...]
It’s strange that as the one world event that directly changed our lives, I don’t remember where I was when the Berlin Wall fell or even exactly how I heard about it.
In November 1989 we were in Chandler, Arizona, over 5000 miles from Berlin. We had moved to Arizona in May, and we didn’t yet [...]
The best lesson for surviving as an expat I learned my first quarter… in fact, my first weeks at the University of Minnesota.
That lesson came early in the “Introduction to Theater” course taught by the legendary Arthur Ballet. My best friend Beth from high school was going to major in Theater, and even though I [...]
Following up on my marketing post from yesterday, I can cover the next two points rather quickly, since they are both in the current TV campaign for “Los Wochos”. You only need to watch one spot, and only pay attention to the last 5 seconds to get both points. In fact, the first point requires [...]
Last week we were at the annual fall franchisee meeting in Tenerife, where we had to endure sunny skies and 30°C while those at home had a week of clouds and rain. We don’t choose where to go for these meetings, we just go where McDonald’s tells us to go.
It’s been two days since the German Bundestag election, which a center-right coalition of Union and FDP was able to win, and I haven’t yet thought of anything to say. I’ve been waiting for someone more intelligent than I to comment, but since she hasn’t posted yet, I’ll have to wing it.
The coupon for tomorrow’s free breakfast on election day just went online today. They are good at all McDonald’s nationwide, but only tomorrow from 9 to 11 am, so you have to be quick! Print out the PDF and you won’t have to buy a newspaper!
When we did our Easy Morning for Free promotion in our restaurant in Dibbersen last year, we received a lot of positive response from within McDonald’s wondering whether the idea could work on a larger scale. A similar promotion was done this spring when the new breakfast menu was introduced in Munich and Stuttgart. But [...]
It all started with with a poster for an Angela Merkel rally in Hamburg…
“The Chancellor is coming”, and someone scribbled “and the crowd goes ‘Yeaahh!’” (or something to that effect). Someone else snapped a picture and posted it to the internets last week. A lot of people thought it was cool, and wouldn’t it be [...]
At the city festival in Buchholz, the city power utility had a rolling carpet on which one could “surf”. Christopher of course had to try it out. He only wiped out twice, but no rug burns. Here are a couple of iPhone snapshots…
Drinks were being served by the local Junge Union, the youth wing of [...]
It took a bit longer than we hoped, but to make sure you find our restaurant on the Winsener Straße in Hamburg-Harburg we’ve complemented our sign on the A7 southbound before the Fleestedt exit with one for the A7 northbound.
It’s hard to tell from the closeup, but the sign is 12 meters wide and nearly [...]
After 8 years, I think I’ve found peace. Inner peace, anyway. Outer peace is so hard to find these days. Just ask anyone in Afghanistan.
But what has changed in that time? Not much. The Marienstrasse is still in Hamburg, the Al-Quds mosque too. We’ve sent soldiers abroad, more soldiers in Iraq have fallen than those [...]
I flew to Munich last weekend for the 5th (my 2nd) annual Whiney Expat Meetup, and it was indeed 2 good good nights, and the days were good as well. It was just the right mix of organization and spontaneity, and having all gotten acquainted online, we [...]
A guest brought us this post card advertising breakfast at McDonald’s in Germany. It must be from 1994.. the prices on the back are in “Marks” and Denglish was obviously very in. Modern breakfast marketing looks different.
With the current debate on health insurance in the United States, some of my readers might be interested in my health coverage here in Germany.
Most employees are required to join the public insurance system. It’s financed something like Social Security, with a percentage (currently 14.9%) of income up to a certain limit (currently 3675€ [...]
I’m sorry, but when I saw these two posters yesterday, I knew they just were begging to be combined in a single post. The poster on the right has managed to hit a taboo-trifecta (race, nudity, homosexualtiy) with maybe even more taboos I haven’t noticed (bad nail polish?).
The oldest remaining shards of what would be become PapaScott date back 10 years to August 1999 and were posted with Blogger, a shiny new technology at the time.
In 1999 we were pregnant with Christopher, and we were calling each other cute names like MamaMaus and PapaScott. And when I started a site on [...]
is Scott Hanson's personal weblog. The opinions expressed here are his and his alone. Scott (48) is an American who has lived since 1990 in Germany. His wife Frauke is a McDonald's franchisee with 3 restaurants in Nordheide-Harburg. They live with son Christopher (10) in Jesteburg (near Hamburg).
I’m a bit late on the uptake here, since it’s been on the menu for over 2 weeks now, but the best Marketing Non-Secret we heard about last October was the Veggieburger which has now debuted in Germany.
