Amanda Shahin Essays - Marketing, Food And Drink, Fast Food

Amanda Shahin Prof. R. Mako Citarella ENG-111-92V 11/05/15 How Fast Food Companies Draw You In As life is speeding us by, people do not have the time to enjoy home-cooked meals anymore with their families on a regular basis. Everyone is rushing from point A to point B trying to be on schedule with all the work and different activities with which they fill their days. People need a quick and easy way to get a cheap and satisfying meal so no time is wasted preparing and making foods on their own. Fast food companies see this need for easy, to go meals and jump at the opportunity to satisfy it. Advertisements from signs, to commercials, to billboards of new great deals and foods from fast food restaurants seem to pop up everywhere we go nowadays, and Michael Moss knows this is no accident. In his essay, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food", Moss discusses how the fast food companies purposely display and create their advertisements and foods in a way to draw people into wanting to buy their products and keep them coming back for more. In McDonald's: What it is. Quar ter Pounder with Cheese commercial, every aspect of it from the words used, how the food is displayed, and how lustful the people are for the product being shown proves to Moss' argument that the advertisements of fast food restaurants are all intentionally designed for people to want to buy their products. In Moss' essay, he discusses how fast food companies are designing their foods to draw people into buying them. What Moss discovers from "over four years of research and reporting, [is] a conscious effort- taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery- store aisle- to hook people on foods that are convenient and inexpensive" (477). For example, food engineers go to the full distance to create the perfect taste and texture for a product. They do this by having "ordinary consumers spend hours sitting in rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is in question" (479). By doing this consumers are able to decide what variation of a product is the best fit for being put out on the market