NYC's law forcing on-menu calorie disclosure impels compliance plans

Nation's Restaurant News, May 12, 2008 by Elissa Elan

Spokesman Stephen Caldeira said the company had experienced problems in designing new boards that would fit inside the different store sizes of its New York City locations.

"Unlike other areas of the country where there is commonality to our footprints, New York contains many different store layouts," he said.

Caldeira said approximately 400 Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins stores in New York are affected by the rule.

"Without question, the increasing regulatory menu-labeling environment is both costly and disruptive to our franchisees and our business," he said. "In lieu of federal pre-emption, which the [National Restaurant Association] and other industry-related organizations are diligently working on, multistate operators, such as Dunkin' Brands, have to deal with a patchwork quilt of varying proposals."

Ruby Tuesday, the 900-unit casual-dining chain based in Maryville, Tenn., has just one New York location, in Times Square, that must post calorie counts on its printed menus. Rick Johnson, the company's senior vice president, said if menu labeling over time ends up being legislated in other states and municipalities, it could "be a big financial hurdle to get over, especially if you have to do it at over 900 restaurants."

"Systemwide, the issue becomes that every time ingredients change even slightly, if we add or remove a sauce or switch to mayonnaise from a mustard dressing, the calorie counts go up or down," he said. "We'd have to reprint the menus because the nutritional information would change."

Johnson added that offering the menus over the Internet and downloading them at the restaurants at the customers' request would be a much more cost-effective and efficient way to provide nutritional information.

Ruby Tuesday voluntarily offered a wide range of nutritional information on its menus briefly in 2004. "What we found was that a percentage of guests liked having it--about 20 percent--and another 20 percent hated the idea it was there and wanted it removed," Johnson said. "The remaining 60 percent didn't care."

Effective communication "is probably the most important thing if you really want [customers] to be informed," said Richard Hendrie, senior vice president of marketing for Uno Chicago Grill, the 200-unit casual-dinnerhouse chain based in Boston. "We don't want them to be overwhelmed with a glut of words."

eelan@nrn.com