Toque of the Town: Fanning the Flames at Burger King

Peter Gibbons puts health and flavor behind Burger King's new fire-grilled marketing message.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 12/1/2003

Two little words can mean a lot. Just ask Peter Gibbons, senior director of research and development for Burger King Corporation. The man responsible for translating brand strategy into tangible product, Gibbons is now deep into researching all the ways the world’s second largest burger chain can “fire grill” something. Never mind that Burger King’s former “flame broiling” phrase meant essentially the same thing. “Fire grilled” brings with it a broadened new product platform with room for more sophisticated, healthful items.

The focus on fire is a big part of CEO Brad Blum’s plan to revitalize the chain, says Gibbons, to burn off some of the stereotypical fast-food fat lingering around Burger King’s image and replace it with a more contemporary, “fresh, healthy, clean and minimally processed” ideal.

Revamping its image is important as Burger King seeks to build traffic and bolster market share lost to competitors who jumped on the healthful food bandwagon sooner. “Burger King has not been as active in moving toward a healthy menu as other chains,” says AG Edwards & Sons analyst Jack Russo. “With their financial situation being what it is, they’ve had other issues to deal with.”

According to Chicago-based Technomic, Burger King’s share of the $47.5 billion U.S. hamburger market dropped two points to 17.5 percent between 1997 and 2002, compared with segment leader McDonald’s, which stayed constant at 43 percent. Comparable-stores sales were down 9 percent for the first six months of 2003 at Burger King’s largest franchisee, Syracuse, N.Y.-based Carrols Corporation, says Tim Lalonde, vice president and controller. Likewise, Mishawaka, Ind.-based Quality Dining Inc., the 123-unit Burger King franchisee, says comparable-store sales for its third quarter ended Aug. 3 were down 9.8 percent.

Burger King is fighting back with its fire-grilled focus. “Fire grilling is one key thing that differentiates us from our competitors,” says Gibbons. “Burgers are still our mainstay, accounting for more than half of our entree sales, but people already understand fire-grilled flavor with our burgers. Now we’re moving ahead with what fire grilling can do to enhance flavor without superfluous fat in other dishes.”

Trimming the Fat
Gibbons introduced three fire-grilled chicken baguette sandwiches—Savory Mustard Chicken, Santa Fe Chicken and Smoky Barbecue Chicken, all $2.89—one at a time in September and October. He doesn’t remember the “eureka moment” when the idea for the sandwiches came. “It was born out of the process of merging what we do well with what we knew we needed to do better,” he says. “Innovation is best done in baby steps: small but deliberate.”

Burger King’s Chicken Whopper, for example, which Gibbons developed for introduction April 1, 2002, helped the system learn needed competencies that paved the way for more chicken sandwiches.

“The Chicken Whopper was our first whole-muscle chicken sandwich,” says Gibbons. “And from beginning to end, there were challenges.” Supply was difficult, he says, as was the challenge of “bridging the gap between natural condition and reliable variation. God didn’t make two fillets alike.” Supply issues have since evened out, and chicken breasts are cut with laser-guided water knives.

Gibbons says the Chicken Whopper drove new traffic to the restaurant, contemporized chicken offerings and set the company’s sights higher, enabling the changes that would follow.

One Chick Leads to Another
The Chicken Caesar Club, $3.49, grilled chicken breast, Parmesan cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato and Caesar sauce, was introduced in July and marketed as a “salad on a bun.” The idea was to take something as familiar as a chicken Caesar salad and reconfigure it in an unfamiliar, very portable way. “Unexpected familiarity is a theme I like to explore a lot in new product development,” Gibbons confides.

Helping the sandwich fit into the system, the new club uses the same bun as Burger King’s sourdough bacon cheeseburger and romaine and iceberg lettuce from its Caesar salad. Peppered bacon, however, was entirely new for Burger King, as was the sauce formulation—more viscous and with a sharper flavor than the dressing used on the Caesar salad. “To borrow a phrase from Emeril, we kicked it up a notch,” Gibbons says.

Less rich than the club, the baguette sandwich was meant to be a fresh product, with minimally processed flavors and 5 grams of fat or less. “We knew that fire-grilling vegetables would add virtually no fat but lots of flavor. And it was the same thing with the sauce, which has fire-grilled tomatoes and ancho chiles,” says Gibbons. “Adding to this, the typical baguette—which carries with it a wonderful association of contemporary freshness—is also a very lean dough.”

Burger King already had convection ovens in place to produce breakfast biscuits. “Using them to bake the baguettes fresh on premise was a great opportunity for us because we knew the customer would see fresh-baked bread as both familiar and as an innovation,” he says.

Nine weeks in development, the Santa Fe Chicken sandwich—grilled chicken breast with fire-grilled chile and tomato sauce, onions and sweet peppers on a baguette—was tested for seven months and introduced Sept. 22.

It was followed by the Savory Mustard Chicken Baguette, with leaf lettuce, tomato and mustard sauce. “I thought the savory mustard was a great upper-end product that produces flavor without superfluous fat,” Gibbons explains.

He then rolled out the Smoky Barbecue Chicken Baguette, with fire-grilled onions, sweet peppers and a chile-spiked barbecue sauce. For the barbecue version, Gibbons incorporated fire-roasted peppers to create a sauce with a specific smoked style of barbecue not typically found in the United States. “With these sandwiches, differentiation was key,” he says.

Paying Attention
Soliciting an outside professional opinion, Gibbons flew in Chicago-based Mexican cooking authority Rick Bayless to taste the sandwiches in New York. Bayless was so impressed with the product that he agreed to endorse it in television ads.

Initial feedback from at least one franchisee suggests that the new sandwiches—and the big fire-grilled advertising campaign supporting them—are making contact. “We’re selling a lot of them,” says Beverly Jelinek, vice president of marketing for Southern Industrial Corporation, franchisee of 34 Burger King units in Northern Florida. “I have to admit, as somebody that’s been a part of the Burger King system for decades, always hearing about flame broiling, I was skeptical about whether the fire-grilled message would make a difference. But people are paying attention.”

Jelinek also says the health message is getting through. “People keep asking, ‘Do these really only have 5 grams of fat?’” she explains.

Such feedback is music to Gibbons’ ears. Since his arrival at Burger King in 2001, he has steadily worked to broaden Burger King’s menu appeal, both with burger line extensions such as the Great American Burger and the chicken sandwiches.

“Innovation on our menu today is significantly more important than it was even three years ago,” says Gibbons. “Americans are increasingly more sophisticated in their tastes, and the restaurant choices they have are enormous. So doing business as usual won’t provide for success in the future. Innovation is absolutely necessary.”

Gibbons, Culinary Institute of America valedictorian (class of 1978) and Boston College grad with a degree in psychology, grew up in the East Coast fishing town of Marblehead, Mass., in a family that appreciated good food. Early memories include heading to Boston’s North End on Friday afternoons with his dad and brothers to select fresh seafood. Such family habits encouraged curiosity about new tastes. “Food was always a background interest,” Gibbons says.

Later career positions, including a job running several Burger King franchises in New York and a position as director of sales and marketing for Beloit, Wis.-based Kerry Ingredient Foodservice Solutions, made Gibbons perk up when a recruiter called looking for someone to head product development for Burger King. “At first I provided a list of names,” he says. “But the more I thought about the position, the more I realized, that’s my job.”

Consumer-Guided Process
Product development at Burger King is a consumer-guided process. The company screens new ideas weekly and develops prototypes for consumers to review. If they pass, they move to operations testing, followed by market tests. “The whole point is to ensure product satisfaction is as excellent as it can be and the marketing is effective. Then we learn, react and implement any necessary changes before a new product goes to launch,” says Glad Markunas, Burger King’s senior vice president of consumer insights.

Gibbons’ product-development team includes six people, all chefs or food scientists with specialties ranging from bakery to red-meat processing. Assignments shift according to the strategic directive of the day.

Doing development for a company of roughly 8,000 U.S. units “is sort of a left brain/right brain process,” Gibbons says. “You start with the team’s culinary expertise on one side, knowing that each product needs to be commercialized in 8,000 restaurants, which requires a manufacturing mindset. The good news is that everyone in our department has manufacturing as well as food background. We can translate ideas from the bench to a manufacturing setting faster than other teams.”

His team’s combination of food and manufacturing expertise means it rarely solicits products from manufacturers. “In almost every case, we originate every product on the benchtop here, develop a standard and ask the manufacturer to match it,” Gibbons says.

Core Concentration
Lately, Burger King benchtops have been filled with products meant for the core menu. Limited-time offers have taken the back seat strategically. “The idea is to build product platforms that have sustainability and staying power,” says Russ Klein, chief marketing officer. “Things that you can inspire variety around, like the baguette launch, which started with one sandwich, followed by a second and then a third.”

Next up? A trio of fire-grilled salads and a new sandwich that uses the fresh-baked baguette. “We worked too hard on that one not to do another sandwich with it,” Gibbons quips.

Also on Burger King’s radar screen: “Breakfast is a critical gateway for us,” says Gibbons, who has fire-grilled meats, breakfast breads and beverages ready to go into test. “Those are the places we think we can see some new signatures coming. And we’ll continue to bring burger products to market.”