Toque of the Town: Burgerville's Natural Resources

Tara Wefers cultivates Burgerville’s QSR menu with sustainable ingredients.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 3/1/2006

You’re in the Pacific Northwest, and you want good food, quickly: a restaurant meal featuring, say, hazelnut-shell-smoked blue cheese on your salad of baby brunia, arugula and tatsoi topped with organic cranberries and apples grown near the banks of the Columbia River. Follow that with an entree of additive-free, Northwest-bred, grass-fed beef; a side of buttermilk-battered, hand-cut Walla Walla sweet onion rings; and perhaps a sundae of locally made ice cream with fresh-picked Oregon strawberries to finish.

No need to head to a high-end independent. You can get all that for just over $10 at Burgerville, the Vancouver, Wash.-based quick-service chain.

Really. Burgerville’s standard hamburger is $1.09, processed from the same grass-fed beef as the best-selling $4.49 Colossal Cheeseburger. The only difference is the bigger model includes cheese and a half-pound of meat. And the chain’s highest-priced menu item—a three-piece platter of North Pacific halibut with chips—tops out at $5.99.

That a burger chain would and could menu many fresh, local, sustainable ingredients in what Vice President of Marketing and menu development lead Tara Wefers calls “a fiscally sustainable fashion” exemplifies progress the sustainable-food movement has made. Sustainability—using earth-friendly methods to grow, raise and process foods for consumption nearby—has gained support in recent years, especially on the West Coast.

“It’s still unusual to see a burger chain do something like this,” says Matthew Buck, assistant director of the Food Alliance, a third-party certifier of sustainable agricultural practices. “But Burgerville has always swum against the current in its efforts to use fresh, locally sourced product.”

Fresh, Local, Marketable
The chain sees sustainability as a logical, and highly marketable, step on the fresh-local path it’s always walked. And it’s got the numbers to prove it. Sales at the privately held company have increased 4 to 8 percent each year since a dramatic 1995 turnaround, when sales jumped 20 percent in response to reimaging, new menus and strong emphasis on local, fresh products. And food and labor costs have risen less than 1 percent since going full bore with the program.

“Somewhere in the early ’90s, we found that we just couldn’t compete in the long term with the burger titans,” explains Chief Cultural Officer Jack Graves.

“Our guest counts had been declining,” adds CEO Tom Mears. “So we refocused on our core values on what we did to make Burgerville unique.”

Burgerville began more strongly promoting its burgers, which had always been made with fresh, locally raised and processed beef, newly topped with ingredients such as Tillamook cheddar and peppered bacon. Milkshakes became a perfect vehicle for showcasing seasonal, locally grown produce: strawberries in early summer, raspberries and blackberries mid-summer, huckleberries through September, and pumpkin and hazelnuts in the fall and winter.

Burgerville switched to additive- and hormone-free, grass-fed beef in 2004. The chain added Oregon-grown hazelnuts in 2002. And it’s been using mercury-free halibut from the Bering Sea since 1998, and Alaskan halibut before that.

The Search Continues
Wefers, who left a position as president of a high-tech services firm to join Burgerville in November 2004, says menu development is a collaborative process that she is responsible for orchestrating throughout parent company The Holland Inc. “I have a real passion for food and for finding innovative ways to integrate the true flavors of the Northwest with our fresh, local sustainable platform,” she says.

Wefers and team have continued to build on that platform. “Item by item, the menu is reviewed to reflect that equation wherever possible,” she says.

In many instances, the challenge is finding a large enough local supply to fit the bill. Wefers has spent more than a year searching for free-range, hormone- and antibiotic-free, vegetable-fed chickens. She’s also been trying to source antibiotic-free shell eggs produced from free-range hens and no-till sustainable wheat from Eastern Washington.

In tandem with ingredient research, Wefers and team work to maintain and embellish Burgerville’s highly successful seasonal-foods promotional calendar. Beyond locally grown berries, hand-cut Walla Walla Sweet Onion Rings, $1.99 for three pieces, continue to score as a huge summer attraction, followed by Sweet Potato Fries, $1.99, in the fall and Chocolate Hazelnut Shake, $3.59, in the winter.

According to Wefers, guest counts during the summer promotion spike approximately 15 percent. “People come out in droves when the sun shines,” she says. “It’s a beautiful time of year here.” And while she can’t substantiate with numbers, she says the fall and winter promotions also do well.

Featuring many season-specific items with the added onus that they be sustainable is no easy task for a chain with 39 stores throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington. “Each item has to be carefully tracked to ensure practices are sustainable, supply is there and flavor is excellent,” Wefers says. She is reviewing wild huckleberries, for example, to ensure that harvesting methods remain sustainable. If not, they’ll be off the menu this summer.

Fresh Hurdles
Training staff how to handle the huge influx of fresh ingredients is also a challenge. Strawberries start arriving in March, with units going through about eight flats a day. “Each year we train our staff to quickly clean, hull and chop these berries in order to ensure freshness,” Wefers says. Berries are mixed with sugar, spooned over sundaes, blended into shakes and served with shortcake.

Likewise, Walla Walla onions, which are featured through the summer, are delicate to work with. “To ensure consistent quality, each year we have a training session at one of our supplier partners to teach trainers the best ways to slice the onions, coat them in batter, season and fry them,” Wefers says.

In addition to specials tied to seasonal products, Wefers and team continue to enhance the core menu with high-quality, sustainable ingredients that can be sourced year-round. In 2005, smoked blue cheese from an Oregon creamery, made from 100 percent cream and cold-smoked over Oregon-hazelnut shells for 16 hours, was the star. Wefers first featured it in the Rogue River Smokey Blue Salad, $5.19, which Burgerville tested in 2005 before moving it onto the core menu in 2006. “The Rogue River Smokey Blue Cheese is an artisan cheese that our guests enjoy, so we’d like to offer it in more ways,” she explains.

Wefers will use the cheese in the Rogue River Smokey Blue Cheese Burger, $4.69, scheduled to launch as a limited-time offer in March. It follows in the footsteps of a 2005 burger LTO, the Barbecue Bacon Colossal Cheeseburger, $3.99, which reached top-three status during its six-week run in September and October.

“We have several special burgers like this that we feature from time to time as limited offers,” Graves says. “They allow for us to be creative with our local ingredients and invite guests to try variations of their favorite burgers.”

From Good to Better
Looking at the 12-category core menu, Wefers says performance is good, but there’s room for improvement. She wants more side dishes beyond french fries and side salad. “Guests know they can substitute apple slices for fries,” she says. “But we are definitely looking at potential additions and embellishments to the list wherever we can find something fresh and local that’s available year-round.” She says something innovative with cheese is a possibility, as are vegetable options such as fried mushrooms.

Burgerville’s Kids Menu, also limited to a short list of hamburger, cheeseburger and chicken strips, is due for expansion or evaluation in 2007. “We’re reviewing entrees and snack-type items targeted for a number of ages,” Wefers says. “We’ve brainstormed a bunch of items but have not made a firm decision on what we’ll move forward with.”

Another concern is building breakfast business, which only makes up 10 percent of sales. Tests thus far have paired Wild Coho salmon with eggs on a sandwich and fruit with yogurt in smoothies.

Upgrades Beyond the Menu
Underscoring all these menu improvements, Burgerville is working to align itself more closely in customer minds as fast casual rather than quick service. It’s a move that makes sense, given the chain’s high-end food focus, strong regional slant and limited table service. But the ’50s-diner design has a more QSR look. So Burgerville designed a prototype for expansion with a Pacific Northwest ambience and added emphasis on service.

Opening this year, the prototype (a remodel of an existing unit) will include open beam ceilings, red stone floors and leather-look upholstery in more family-friendly seating layouts and will have additional employees it dubs “guest ambassadors” dedicated to bringing food to tables and refilling glasses.

Could there be a Burgerville East in the plans? “Anything could happen,” says Wefers. “With national expansion, Burgerville would approach each geography with a fresh, local stance, specific to each region.”

But for the short term, Wefers says it makes more sense to stay in the Pacific Northwest: “We are going to listen to how our guests respond to the new restaurant design and will consider it moving forward.