Forked: A New Standard for American Dining by Saru Jayaraman

Author:Saru Jayaraman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-01-13T14:00:00+00:00

*No tipped employees.

However, there are several emerging hamburger restaurants that are breaking out of the mold. See Table 5.2.

Table 5.2 HIGH-ROAD RESTAURANTS

*no tipped employees.

One such high-road restaurant is Moo Cluck Moo in Michigan, which owner Brian Parker opened with his business partner in April 2013. Parker’s approach represents a wholly different business model than the low-road approach that is pervasive in the United States today.

Moo Cluck Moo’s approach is centered on ensuring the highest quality of their primary output: hamburgers. To do so, the company sources all its beef from a farm in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, that utilizes authentic Japanese Kobe beef practices—methods of treating cows that ensure better, healthier, and more marbled beef. “[The farm] had a Kobe cattle farming master who sold them the [cattle] DNA, [who] was the architect of the grasses, forages, nutrients in the soil that they grow on their 200 acres.” Cattle on the farm live at least three years in an open-range, antibiotic-free environment that takes every measure to ensure the animals live relatively stress-free. “I’ve walked the fields with these people,” Parker says. “Their animals are happy, their tails are flipping, their coats are shiny; they’re not listless, lifeless drugged animals. I think they’re treated better than some humans.”

Parker’s experience being actively engaged with the sourcing of his restaurant’s primary ingredient—a relatively uncommon experience among restaurant owners—has made the possibility of doing business any other way seem impossible. “These farmers are so into their product, its quality, the feeding process, the cattle life cycle,” he says. “How could we not align with these people?”

Moo Cluck Moo’s food sourcing practices dovetailed naturally into their employment practices. As Parker tells it, “We’re not cutting bags open and just prepping everything; there’s no processed food. We needed a higher caliber employee—not just to put the food together really well, but to do it consistently.” To achieve excellence and continuity in his workforce, Parker has had to work upstream to create a work environment that was conducive to keeping people around. This entailed getting on board with the emerging national movement toward a universal $15 wage—only a slight increase over the $14 hourly rate that Moo Cluck Moo offered employees, but an important and symbolic one nonetheless.

For Parker and his partner, the benefits of their progressive approaches to business have been exponential. Their $15 wage announcement came in the midst of hundreds of fast-food-worker protests in the United States and around the world, and coincided with President Obama’s visit to Michigan to campaign for increases in the minimum wage. Accordingly, Moo Cluck Moo’s announcement that it would pay burger-making employees $15 an hour ended up providing the restaurant with a “year’s amount of press, both local and national,” according to Crain’s Detroit.11

Parker recalls one bit of press with particular satisfaction. “I heard a staff member saying to a reporter, ‘This isn’t a job. A job is a means to an end. This is a career for me.’ ” Parker adds, “I want people to have a sense of place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.