Executive Summary

Wendy´s is a restaurant chain that is immersed in the Fast Food Restaurant Industry where we can find companies that compete in different segments, being Burger, Sandwich, Snacks/Beverages, Chicken and Pizza the most important. By system wide sales, Wendy´s Company is the number 4 in the US; behind McDonalds, Subway and Burger King, they have almost 6.000 restaurants (owns or franchises) and approximately $ 8,3 billion in sales.

In the lasts years the company has lost Market Share in the US Fast Food Restaurant Industry and we can relate the reasons with internal and external problems. Since his founder Dave Thomas died on 2002, the company continued to perform well for the next 3 years. But on the following ones had problems of branding the company, management distractions from the merge with the company Arby´s, a lack of creating new innovative menus and not meeting entirely the slogan of the freshness of their products.

Within this stage of things, we are proposing Wendy´s Company to introduce a new Healthy Menu line to increase their sales, for that we are defining the related Marketing Research Problem: “Determine the consumers´ preferences and purchase intentions for a new Healthy Menu line to be introduced in Wendy´s restaurants”.

The study gave us this mayor finding:

  • The customers of Burger King, McDonald´s and Wendy´s that have significant concerns about healthy food tend to go less often to the fast food restaurants, In the case of Subway it is the opposite, customers that have rising health concerns are going more often. For Arby´s we did not find correlations.
  • The visitors of the restaurants don´t care about health topics, with the exception of Subway.
  • We didn´t find significant relationship between the amount of visits and the perceived quality.
  • With statistical significance, the average profile of the healthy concerned consumers´ is: Female, middle aged, married with high level of income and education.
  • Light users of the fast food restaurants have strong healthy food habits concerns and they represent almost the 20 percent of all the customers, if we add the medium users we have 1/3 of the customers.

With this information, we recommend generating the healthy menu line to attract the light and medium users of the fast food restaurants because they represent 1/3 of all the visitors and they agree with the concerns about health care and can increase their visits to the restaurant.

Subway Company is an example of growing sales and gain of market share with a statistical significance for health concerns of their customers.

We don’t´ recommend changing other menus because consumers don’t relate in a significant way Wendy´s with health topics. According to the targeted customers, at the beginning this menu must be offered in the middle upper class restaurants for middle aged customers, preferably trying to attract female customers.

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