— Surge Soda is back in stores. Everyone’s favorite citrus-y sugar liquid, which has been fantasized over for years, can now be had at a growing list of regular stores—for now. You no longer need to use your friend’s roommate’s amazon prime account to order a 24 pack of tall boys. The nostalgia train just keeps running in all industries. Surge joins French Toast Crunch, Crispy M&Ms, and the Full house reboot to firmly send us back in time.
— McDonald’s switching to Cage Free Eggs. After recently announcing the decision to begin serving all day breakfast they have now announced a change to their eggs. Although the timing couldn’t be worse due to sky high egg prices, McDonald’s has doubled down and announced they will begin transitioning to cage free eggs. For a company operating at the Scale of McDonalds, which cracks open billions of eggs a year, this is a major undertaking that is expected to take 10 years to full transition. Its exciting to see big dogs like McDonalds being forced to react to customer preferences for healthier more natural food. The Cage free eggs change is in addition to the removal of human antibiotics and switching to real butter made earlier this year.
— NYC Chain restaurants will begin providing warning labels on menus next to items that contain more than the recommended daily limit of 2,300 milligrams of sodium. Chain restaurants tend to have a heavier hand with the sodium content than most people estimate. The idea is to simply provide dinners with actionable information to help inform decisions. This should be helpful addition to the already existing requirement of chain restaurants (with 15 or more nationwide locations) to post their calories. As a consumer, I appreciate knowing that the healthy sounding shrimp salad actually has more calories and sodium than a more indulgent sounding burger. Hopefully the calorie and salt notifications roll out beyond NYC soon.
— McDonald’s isn’t the only major brand listening to consumers. Oreo’s and Chips Ahoy! announced they will begin dedicating a substantial amount of their new product development to healthy products. In recent years they have begun to get wild with newer flavors but most of the innovation for Oreos has been adding food coloring to the cream or doubling the amount of it. Will be interesting to see if any healthy products make it to market.
— Taco Bell broke the Food Blog world last week with they unveiled the Naked Crispy Chicken Taco. The Taco wears its protein on the outside with a “shell” made of fried chicken and filled with lettuce, tomato, and cheese. Looking for signs of this spreading beyond a tight test market and we’ll report back.