It all started with the yogurt. Long thought an arcane, sour-ish, pudding-y substance eaten by elders in the Far East and obscure parts of Russia, US food purveyors put sugar and flavors in it, froze it up, and offered it for sale across the land at perky little shops with perky little kidfolks serving it up. Suddenly ice cream’s poor relative was hip and trendy, the words “I can’t believe it’s yogurt” falling from our sweetened yet benumbed lips as we gobbled up the stuff.
After that came latte, coffee’s high-falutin cousin, and we all know what Starbucks has done with what is essentially sweetened, coffee-flavored milk. Some 6,800 Starbucks stores in the US alone — need we say more?
Next on the scene, given Americans’ dual and dueling obsessions with healthy eating and sweets, came juice bars, of which Jamba Inc. is probably the largest purveyor. (It opened its 700th store in 2007. Maui Wowi has only around 500 sites; Planet Smoothie a mere 135.) And Jamba didn’t just offer sweetened, colored beverages. No, no, it used real juice, real fruit, threw in substances that were, when the company started out in 1990, known only to the health-food-store crowd (you know, old hippies, earth mothers, and others of the generally non-conforming sector of our society). Things like extracts from the leaves of the Ginkgo biloba tree and blue-green algae — things that Jamba said had healing powers. Even though it sounded so California — indeed, Jamba got its start in California and, even now, the great bulk of its outlets are in located there — we caved. We patronized the place. We stood in its often long waiting lines, which have abated somewhat, the company having figured out how to get their cute little smoothie servers to work more efficiently. And we paid five bucks for one of those babies. But, hey, they tasted so great, so fresh, and they were good for us.
The latte folks noticed. You-know-who added Frappuccinos and even Frappuccino Lights to lure us back to its coffee shops, the better to thin our waistlines and (surprise, surprise) fatten its bottom line.
But there’s another player in all this. The granddaddy of them all when it comes to selling Americans convenience, taste, and value, if not nutrition. Golden Arches anyone? The big McD had everything our poor little cast of “wannabe successful in the quick-serve restaurant biz” players had — yogurt, coffee, why, even, smoothies. (Although McD calls them Triple Thick Shakes and, on the good-for-you scale, they score pretty low, consisting in large part of fillers, colorings, sweeteners, and surprisingly, a good deal of salt.) And, while the burgers continued to flip their way into our tummies, McDonald’s successfully added breakfast to its offerings. The McMuffin was a breakaway hit from the beginning and it’s been going strong ever since.
But guess what? Starbucks noticed. Enter the faux egg-and-bread-product offering — queasy little hockey pucks that stank up the Starbucks venue with the greasy-spoon smell of eggs in the morning, out-aroma-ing what the company hopes is the heady, wallet-loosening aroma of its coffee. The pucks were yanked from the menu. The company went back to concentrating on coffee, particularly since McD has scared the corporate pants off of Starbucks by offering not-at-all-bad-tasting premium coffee at not-at-all-bad prices.
And now, in some strange game of musical breakfasts, Jamba has announced that 40% of us go without breakfast (horrors!) and it is going to do something about it (thank heavens). It just announced that it is adding a breakfast menu to its lineup. Tricky thing though, you can’t just plop a raw egg into expensive smoothies. We’re not looking for a cure for a hangover here. We want to get the customers in to our stores more often. We want not only thirsty customers, we want hungry ones as well. But it’s gotta be healthy.
Jamba says its breakfast menu, test-marketed last fall in Los Angeles and New York, will consist of all-natural baked goods, freshly squeezed juices, yogurt and fruit blends, and here comes what it thinks of as unique and healthier options, yogurt and granola blends. Naming them Chunky Smoothies, they range in price from $2.65 to $4.15. The Chunky Strawberry selection is made of bananas, strawberries, granola, and peanut butter blended with soymilk and yogurt.
Hmmm. A chunky smoothie? Does it come in an Oxymoron flavor?
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