Every effort to incorporate fresh fare into fast food, it seems, wilts. Consider the McWrap. McDonald’s introduced the chicken-sandwich variant in fourteen thousand U.S. locations in 2013, after having spent two years building a supply chain for fresh cucumbers. Then, this past year, it pulled the underperforming product from every menu in America. Four months earlier, as if anticipating its own decision, the company had débuted a provocative television ad deriding healthy foods. In it, the camera gawped at the oozing midsection of a Big Mac while a stentorian narrator declared, “All vegetarians, foodies, and gastronauts, kindly avert your eyes! You can’t get juiciness like this from soy or quinoa! This is not Greek yogurt, nor will it ever be kale.”
Whether or not the ad was self-sabotaging, it might also be construed as a little defensive, released as it was in 2015, when a new guard of fast-casual restaurant chains, including Chipotle, Fresh & Co., and Sweetgreen, was nibbling away at McDonald’s market share. Still, with products double and triple the cost of a Big Mac combo meal, the young competitors don’t yet pose any real danger to conventional fast food. “The big issues are sourcing, labor, and price points,” Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University, told me. “These are issues for any chain restaurant, but places that depend on fresh, sustainable ingredients have extra challenges, including the perception that their foods are expensive.”
David Friedberg, a former Google programmer with a degree in astrophysics, hopes to overcome these challenges with a new vegetarian chain called Eatsa. “We’ve got to do two things: get healthy products down to a price point that McDonald’s and Taco Bell are winning on, and offer products tasty enough to disrupt the meat-focussed fast-food business,” he told me recently. “We think the way to do it is quinoa.” Eatsa, which opened its first New York store in midtown Manhattan this week, is quintessentially Northern Californian in concept: imagine a Chipotle crossed with a vending machine designed by Apple. There are no tables, chairs, or counters at an Eatsa, and no people taking orders or distributing food. You input your menu choice at an iPad kiosk, and your food—a twelve- or sixteen-ounce bowl of quinoa with toppings—is delivered via a wall of transparent cubbies, which darken to black when an order is up. “What’s back there—robots? Keebler elves?” one customer wondered aloud when I visited the flagship location, in downtown San Francisco. “I like not knowing.” (Humans do prepare the bowls, Friedberg told me, “at least for now.”) There are eight flavor themes available, which range from Southern (toasted red quinoa, barbecue portobello, grilled corn, crispy onion strings, ranch dressing) to Middle Eastern (lemon-herb quinoa, falafel, hummus, arugula, feta, olives, harissa).
Friedberg thought up Eatsa two years ago, when he was working for the agribusiness giant Monsanto. (Michael Specter wrote about him in 2013.) He had been working eighty-hour weeks and drinking the meal replacement Soylent to save time, and he wanted an alternative. A lifelong vegetarian, he settled on quinoa—“the most complete and energy-efficient plant protein”—and sketched out a business plan. Then he recruited Tim Young, a friend from his undergraduate days at Berkeley, to be the new company’s C.E.O. They solved their first two financial challenges—labor and real-estate costs—with the Cupertino-inspired design. “We didn’t set out to build a techno restaurant for the sake of building a techno restaurant,” Friedberg said. “Automation was just a solution to the problems of cost and speed.”
Their locations are small by restaurant standards, and the vertically arranged cubbies, Friedberg said, are far more efficient than horizontal counters, making them excellent for “throughput.” In theory, one Eatsa can service seven hundred customers an hour. (Chipotle stores, for comparison, average about six hundred and fifty customers a day.) But Friedberg said that he and Young “aren’t ready to disclose unit economics”—that is, how many customers are actually coming. And while the Web site purports to deliver the bowls “blazing fast,” they said it’s too soon to put a precise time limit on delivery. (In my visits to two Eatsa locations, the bowls appeared within between two and eight minutes of ordering.) They also declined to say how much the workers behind the cubbies get paid.
Eatsa’s other big cost is its ingredients. The company uses organic quinoa sourced from the grain’s birthplace, the Andes region of Bolivia and Peru, which still produces the world’s highest-quality varietals—large, fluffy quinoa with mild flavor. Both countries have restricted the release of their heirloom seeds to international growers, so for the time being they remain the titans of quinoa. But, like any self-respecting fast-food entrepreneur, Friedberg practices vertical integration; in 2014, as he was formulating his Eatsa idea, he bought NorQuin, a Canada-based company that grows quinoa on forty thousand acres of land, in Saskatchewan. The Canadian grain is less palatable than its Andean counterpart—smaller, stickier, and stronger-flavored—but NorQuin plans to breed grains with heirloom qualities. The average bowl at Eatsa now costs about seven dollars without extras; eventually, with Canadian quinoa and improved use of technology throughout the supply chain, Friedberg hopes it will fall below five dollars.
That leaves the question of flavor. “Whether this concept will appeal to people who aren’t already converted to plant-based diets remains to be seen,” Nestle said. “I’d worry that quinoa will wear out its welcome.” Here again, Friedberg and Young have taken up the tools of their new trade, hiring a team of full-time biochemists to analyze flavor and texture at the molecular level and develop sauces and toppings that can satisfy even the customer who craves a Big Mac. As a result, quinoa figures into the flavor of an Eatsa bowl the way the bass line figures into a Metallica song: it’s not the most noticeable element. The lunch bowls contain as much as thirty-two grams of fat and fourteen hundred milligrams of sodium—on par with a Big Mac-and-large-fries combo, which has twelve hundred milligrams of sodium and fifty-three grams of fat. (Most Eatsa bowls have single-digit levels of saturated fats, however, considerably lower than the levels in the combo meal.)
High sodium and fat content, which are associated with heart disease, may counteract some of the health benefits of the vegetable-rich quinoa bowls. But Friedberg is more interested in the grain’s planetary benefits. Animal feed, he noted, supplies the calories for growing the entire animal, not just the meat that’s sold as the end product; in his view, “bones and fur and feathers and organs for breathing and breeding and farting” constitute waste. “The energy-in to protein-out in chickens is about eight to one,” he said. “For beef, it’s about thirty to one. For quinoa, it’s about one to one.” He and Young don’t market Eatsa that way, though. None of the Eatsa messaging says anything about the environment, and the company motto is “Better food, faster.” It’s a virtuous bait and switch, Friedberg told me. “Five or maybe ten per cent of people think about eating healthy and eating for the planet,” he said. “The other ninety per cent care about taste, price, and speed—in that order. So if we can make people want quinoa on a mass scale, then we’re taking demand away from meat, and away from the corn and soy crops that feed that meat.” He added, “That could lead to systemic shifts of incredible scope and significance.”
