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Making food from scratch takes a lot of time and a lot of experienced and dependable employees. If you use quality ingredients, so that the food you produce is actually worth all that effort, it will also cost a lot more in just the food cost (without adding in all that labor) than mass produced, crap fast food.
You can buy a case of 40 crappy 1/4lb frozen burgers for 12 bucks. 10lbs of quality meat to grind your own burgers will cost you 3 times that. Then you have to pay for the grinder, the guy who trims and grinds the meat, and the guy who knows how to cook a decent burger (not throw a frozen one on a conveyor cooker).
So instead of a crappy burger for 3 bucks, you get a quality burger for 9 bucks....and the profit margin on the crappy one is higher. And they are both still just hamburgers. The difference between good and crappy is huge, but hell....it's a burger. People in this country are used to eating crappy burgers, just put on more ketchup.
You can make scratch food and make a good profit if you aren't serving huge pieces of protein on bread, that's why some of the best scratch food is found in ethnic places. Thai, Chinese, Ethiopian, and fusion places can all make a great product from scratch without a ton of labor (simple, cheap, ingredients combined in skillful ways).
Some of the food trucks out there make an amazing product that is almost completely from scratch, all items created in house. It's fresh, fast, and amazing. It's also cheap, but still about twice what you would pay at McD's. And McD's still makes a higher profit margin and has lower labor costs.
No public company would last long (Even if they were wildly popular and making huge amounts of money) with that formula....cause the board would want to maximize short term profit to maximize their bonus checks and destroy what made the company great, unconcerned with the consequences because by the time it fell apart, they would have been called "superstars" for upping the profits....and gone on to take a higher paying job somewhere else. So no national chain will ever do it (5 guys is a perfect example of this, they are already going waaaaay downhill in quality and using many more frozen and mass produced items). Regional chains under the control of one person or family could pull it off, but why would they? More money in selling crap.
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