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Better question, If we can put the proverbial man on the moon, why can't a restaurant simply take some fresh ground hamburger (not those cookie cutter preshaped frozen patties of unknown origin), grill it to a bit of crispy and place it on a quality bun. Let the customer squirt a dab of catsup, or if not, don't.

JH



Are you CRAZY? Fresh hamburger??? Our government and your local brace of lawyers will never let you injest something that dangerous. They'll tell you what you can safely eat and fresh burgers aren't on the list.

Just a bit of business sarcasm there!

I'm in the Quick Service business, same company for 27 years. Back than, we referred to it as "fast food". In '79, we served fresh ground beef burgers, in fact we made our own patties. 22% fat content, which was delicous. They were always cooked medium, also delicous!

We switched to flash-frozen in the early 80's when labor became scarce. Now with minimum wage increases on the horizon, we could never afford the labor to patty out our own burgers.

Last year we tested fresh burges against our frozen patty (Flash frozen is a little different than a typical frozen puck, like Mcd's, etc.). Taste wise there wasn't any improvment so we stuck with the current patty.

We serve all burgers plain, you dress them at our Fixin's Bar. Fuddruckers is still serving a fresh patty and a generous fixin's bar. Not sure what regions they cover, but are sprinkled around the East Coast.

My company bought the Roy Rogers brand a few years ago and we're trying to relaunch the brand. More info here:
Roy Rogers Restaurants

Buy a franchise, help get my youngest through college!

Al