Starbucks sold how many gift cards?!

Welcome to the latest edition of Restaurant Weekly. Today we're talking Starbucks' juggernaut gift-card program, Chipotle's big hiring plans, and much more...

3 NUMBERS

19,000

Number of workers Chipotle wants to hire from March to May (aka “Burrito Season”). That’s up 27% from its recruitment goal a year ago, suggesting that the company is “expecting an even busier spring than usual,” per CNBC.

$14.75 million

Amount raised by Chef Robotics in a combo debt/equity round . TechCrunch reports that the startup will use much of the funding toward deploying its RaaS (“robotics as a service”) plan, which tailors a robotic arm to assemble a dish to a restaurant's exact specifications.

$108 billion

Amount McDonald’s contributes to the U.S. gross domestic product , according to a recent Oxford Economics report. How’d the report reach that figure? Among other things, McD’s says that in 2023 it and its franchisees generated 1.4 million jobs, paid $22 billion in taxes, and grossed more than $50 billion in domestic sales.

Quick Hits

• Amid a customer boycott, labor battles, and increased competition in China, Starbucks delivered a highly anticipated earnings report this week , showing a global same-store-sales increase of 5%. Starbucks said traffic fell a bit starting in November, but mostly among occasional, non-loyalty-member customers.
• Here’s a crazy stat: $3.6 billion was loaded onto Starbucks gift cards last quarter. That’s more than many well-known, national chains gross in a year. (That’s a whole IHOP .)
• Subway reported a strong 2023 . Same-store-sales rose 5.9% in North America (6.4% globally), while its snack line (the “Sidekicks”) appears to to be satisfying a need for a footlong churro that customers didn’t know they had: The chain sold 3.5 million in its first two weeks.
• Portillo’s CEO Michael Osanloo told Bloomberg that the “Ozempic Effect” is overblown , adding it might be more of a “Coastal thing” than a “Midwest, heartland thing.”
• Steve Ells’ new restaurant startup Kernal — which is set to open its first location in Manhattan this month — can now count NFL quarterbacks Daniel Jones and Justin Fields as investors , according to the NY Post. Kernal plans on heavily incorporating robotics in its kitchen and will serve an entirely meat-free menu. (Fields, by the way, is a vegan.)
• Jersey Mike’s will begin testing AI phone ordering at 50 locations through a partnership with the company Soundhound. The technology has been trained on the entire Jersey Mike’s menu, and, according to Soundhound, can “handle order placement and answer queries about menu items, specials, store information, and more, all while ensuring orders are taken accurately and efficiently.” Listen to the dulcet AI tones here .
• According to Yelp, 2023 was a banner year for new restaurant openings. Yelp tracked 53,793 new restaurant openings in 2023 , up 10 percent from 2022.

Name That Chain!

You get three guesses to name this week’s mystery chain:

• This Italian chain began its life as a deli shop
• The chain’s matriarch opened her first store in Brooklyn in 1957
• It’s Michael Scott’s favorite place to get a New York slice

Stay tuned… the answer will be in the next issue of the newsletter.

Last issue’s answer: Captain D’s

#Content Recs

• The super-fans who line up at 4:30 a.m. to be first at In-N-Out and Chick-fil-A openings.
• “It’s carnage everywhere.” A not-optimistic take on the state of independent restaurants in 2024 .
• The Oscars of food — the James Beard Awards — announced the 2024 semifinalists for Outstanding Restaurant and Chef .
• Fascinating piece on Kevin Hart’s plant-based chain Hart House , which will try to combat customer apathy toward plant-based concepts with its “unfair advantage” — Hart’s mega-celebrity.
• Location intelligence company Placer.AI released a whole bunch of data about Chipotle, McDonald’s, and Panda Express . Among other findings: McDonald’s and Chipotle dinnertime visits are up, while lunch visits have dropped. (McDonald’s breakfast, though, appears to be making a comeback.)
• A (quite positive) review of what it’s like to order takeout from Wonder .
• Deep-fried toothpicks are all the rage on TikTok . (Health officials: not huge fans.)

‘Member When?

Welcome to a new feature of the newsletter, in which we plumb the depths of our collective memory to uncover things lost to fast-food history.

This week: Original Mexican Pizza

Mexican Pizza has had a pretty fascinating history. It first hit Taco Bell’s menus in 1985 under the brand name, uh, “Pizzaz Pizza,” and was (wisely) renamed three years later.

In late 2020, Taco Bell pulled the Mexican Pizza from its permanent menu. Fans pushed back to a surprising degree, and after a Change.org petition collected some 170,000 signatures, Taco Bell brought the item back.

Taco Bell’s website says that the Mexican Pizza returned in “all its previous glory, complete with the same ingredients including seasoned beef and refried beans between two fried flour tortillas, topped with pizza sauce, three-cheese blend and fresh diced tomatoes.”

EXCEPT… fast-food OGs know that there existed a previous, even more glorious version of the Mexican Pizza, which featured olives and green onions. Over the years, Taco Bell quietly dropped the two ingredients from the recipe (featured here in this evocative 1980s commercial ). Thrillist provides an excellent timeline :

“Early '90s?—?A Taco Bell representative tells Thrillist that this is when Taco Bell removed the olives from Mexican Pizza. The exact year was not provided. This was the first of two notable ingredients removed from the original construction of Mexican Pizza.

"2006-ish?— This, according to a representative, is when green onions were removed from Mexican Pizza. A specific date wasn't provided, but logic says 2006 might be a good guess as to the year. At that time,?it was reported ?that green onions were being removed from all items on the Taco Bell menu in response to an E. coli outbreak.”

True connoisseurs miss them both.