Super Sizing Egypt?

November 2006
Super Sizing Egypt?
News Analysis: Under attack abroad for its contribution to the Western world’s obesity problem, McDonald’s is changing eating and consumer habits in Egypt, too

By Andrew Bossone

DDRIVING SOUTH ON highway I-95 on the United States’ East Coast, it’s easy to tell when you pass a town: The giant golden arches of McDonald’s hover near the road exits. I-95 runs from the northernmost state, Maine, to the southernmost, Florida, with many changes of scenery along the way. But what’s constant in every town is the dominance of fast food chains.

On a trip a few years ago, I counted the number of Waffle House restaurants, 24-hour southern breakfast diners with distinguishably tall, black-and-yellow signs; I stopped counting somewhere around 37.

The remarkable uniformity across thousands of miles and towns has given rise to the nickname ‘the United States of Generica.’ New Jersey is so filled with big highways, gated communities and strip malls that when people say they live there, the next question is not, “Where in New Jersey?” but “Which exit?”

Is the same thing happening here? Uniform housing communities are popping up from Sinai to Sixth of October, from the eastern stretches of the North Coast straight down the Red Sea. A good way to tell you have reached Ain Sokhna from Cairo is when you see the KFC sign in the distance. Heading to the World War II battlefields of El-Alamein? Fast-food eateries welcome you off the desert highway.

The trend is set to become more pronounced: The pending entrance of Burger King, Papa John’s, and Starbucks will inevitably raise questions about Egypt’s national character. Indeed, the question is already asked almost every Ramadan as pundits in the daily press wonder whether the swarms of people in line at fast food restaurants during iftar suggest that the Egyptian family unit is starting to fall apart.

“Egypt can never become generic — the States can,” counters Ahmed El Aawar, chairman of Egyptian Company for Modern Restaurant Management (EMRM), which runs the local chain Wessaya. “I truly believe in my heart it will never become generic. It’s too old, too sophisticated. People are aware of what you are talking about, at least the wise men.”

El Aawar, a veteran of the fast food business, helped open the country’s first McDonald’s in 1992 and worked his way up before heading KFC Egypt. He left KFC to join El-Sewedy Group, whose food division he purchased in June in a rare management buyout.

While El Aawar has undoubtedly contributed to the generification (if you’ll tolerate the term) of Egypt, he did help create Wessaya. Instead of paying fees to a foreign corporation, plus a percentage of sales and a chunk that goes into a shared advertising pool, all the profits stay right here at home. Wessaya is now part of a growing number of local chains that include the more upscale Abou Shakra (which began serving kofta on Kasr El-Aini Street in 1947 and now has a franschisee in Saudi Arabia), as well as sandwich shops Gad and Mo’men.

So the onslaught of chain restaurants is not limited to foreign brands. In truth, there is little danger that fast food restaurants supplant a 5,000-year-old culture as easily as they have an American eating culture that was not even 200 years old when they started sprouting like mushrooms across the landscape. And, in all fairness, Egypt is not the only country that has McDonald’s: The fast food behemoth operates 30,000 restaurants in 100 countries on six continents, serving meals to 46 million people every day.

Today, McDonald’s and KFC earn most of their profits abroad, calling the push into foreign markets “global realization,” according to Eric Schlosser’s groundbreaking book Fast Food Nation.

In the beginning, “my biggest challenge would be to teach the Egyptian to eat at McDonald’s,” says Mohamed Mansour, managing director of McDonald’s Egypt. “It was not part of the culture 12 years ago. Is it part of the culture now? Maybe a bit. Is it where I want it to be? Definitely not.”

The growth of Western food brands and chain restaurants in general might not be a sign that Ronald McDonald will become more important than Saad Zaghloul (although if you showed a picture of the two to most little children, guess which one they would likely recognize), but it could be a sign of what the sociologist George Ritzer describes in his book the McDonaldization of Society. Although critics of McDonald’s sometimes exaggerate the cultural impact of fast food chains, the fact that they are flourishing here may not say as much about the chains’ influence as it implies about ongoing changes in Egyptian culture.

McIftar

Mohammed El-Helwary sits anxiously in front of his food, waiting for the azzan to signal he can break his Ramadan fast. El-Helwary is not surrounded by his family in front of large, steaming dishes — he’s sitting with friends in a fast food restaurant.

“My job, I’m working from 10 in the morning until 2am. I come here to take a break,” says El-Helwary, a journalist with the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Reem, a student at the American University in Cairo, likewise has little time to travel out to Heliopolis every night and so spends most iftars near campus.

For these two customers, fast food provides efficiency, one of the four conditions of a fast food restaurant outlined in Ritzer’s book.

“In a society where people rush, usually by car, from one spot to another, the efficiency of a fast-food meal, perhaps even without leaving their cars by wending their way along the drive-through lane, often proves impossible to resist. The fast-food model offers people, or at least appears to offer them, an efficient method for satisfying many needs,” Ritzer writes.

Galal Amin, a popular professor of economics at AUC and the noted author of Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?, has never been to McDonald’s and most likely never will. He remembers a dairy shop a few years ago on the corner of Mohammed Mahmoud Street in Tahrir Square, not a fast food restaurant. Today, the stretch of this street from Tahrir until past the university is a veritable fast food row. There are at least eight branches of chain restaurants and cafés in three blocks.

“Fast food places mechanize eating,” says Amin, whose latest book is The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World: A Critique of Western Misconstructions. “Like any mechanized activity, it makes things easy, quicker, cleaner. With as little fuss as possible. As you know, mechanization attracts the younger people more than the older people. Older people like to take their time. They don’t like to be hurried. They don’t mind the ceremony or the rituals.”

(For more on Galal Amin, see this month’s Face Of Business, starting on page 74.)

Amin finds it more interesting that more people are eating out than ever before — not just during iftar. When the two brothers who started McDonald’s changed their restaurant more than 50 years ago by getting rid of metal utensils and replacing plates with foam containers, they did not know they would change the way people all around the world eat meals. Today, almost all of the food at McDonald’s can be eaten with your hands.

“The nearest thing to the hamburger in Egypt is the fuul and the falafel sandwich,” says Amin. “Even the falafel sandwich now has really become much more mechanized than before. Before, [you went] to a little restaurant to eat a dish of fuul. It was not eating a sandwich. It was sitting down and putting lemon on the beans and all sorts of little spices. Now, more and more, these places are getting mechanized. The same fuul sandwich is repeated over and over again. You know what you are getting.”

This fulfills predictability, a second condition of McDonaldization. When you go to a fast food restaurant, you can expect with certainty that the sandwich and fries you ate the last time you were there will be exactly the same this time. One customer at McDonald’s, Ahmed Hassem, was eating chicken for iftar one afternoon last month. Asked how the food compares to what his mother makes at home, he responded, “No, the food, I like it better here. I feel they are more professional. They grill the best chicken.”

Predictability, however, is not necessarily tantamount to truly knowing what you are eating — at least not when it comes to the ingredients. It is a knowledge of what it will taste like, although the consumer usually equates consistency with knowing the product. McDonald’s goes through rigorous processing to ensure the food stays exactly the same. For french fries, it means genetically modifying the potatoes to add or remove sugars that change the appearance and taste and cooking it in an oil derived from animal fats. For chicken, it means using birds pumped with steroids and then processing them to make a consistent patty, one that only faintly resembles any part of a chicken.

“We ensure the quality of the beef is 100% pure beef. We have no additives in it, which I consider healthy,” Mansour counters. And on one point, he may be entirely correct: “The quality controls we have in the stores and with the suppliers I think [are] maybe the strongest in the market.”

McChoice

Control is the third condition of McDonaldization and might be the professionalism to which Hassem referred. This is somewhat connected to predictability in the sense that the experience is consistent, because walking into a McDonald’s is walking into a very controlled environment.

“The people who eat in fast-food restaurants are controlled, albeit (usually) subtly. Lines, limited menus, few options, and uncomfortable seats all lead diners to do what management wishes them to do — eat quickly and leave,” Ritzer writes.

“They give the idea to the consumers that they have a choice, but they really don’t have a choice,” says Amin. “You know exactly what you are getting. And when you say, ‘I’m going to a McDonald’s,’ you know exactly what you are going to have. There’s not really much variety. You either have some chips beside it or not. You either put some ketchup or not that’s not a fantastically great variety. To throw a piece of cheese in the middle is not a great variety.”

In The Illusion of Progress, Amin addresses the issue of consumer choice, or what he believes is the illusion of it. He questions the value of globalization and free market economics, saying that state intervention does not necessarily provide less freedom. On the other hand, a free market in which citizens are inundated with advertisements only gives the illusion of choice, he claims.

“The assault of advertisements and hawkers of goods in the mass media, for example, encouraging consumerist lifestyle, which the market system necessarily elicits, could suppress freedom in no less dangerous a fashion than powerful state intervention,” Amin writes. “The point is that the market system, while giving some freedom with one hand, may take other freedoms away with the other.”

The choice is no longer to buy or not to buy, but what to buy. Amin says that freedom of choice essentially disappears when one choice, the West, is put against another choice, the local, because the deck is stacked in favor of the bigger and stronger. “All that is being asked of them is to choose what they regard as the best, or, in other words to assess cultural products the way economists assess projects and to choose the one with the greatest net benefits,” he writes.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Amin, one of the most popular academics on the street — and one of the least popular in the nation’s boardrooms. “With the sophistication of the advertising, the amount of choice you have, nobody can force you to anything,” says El Aawar. “Even the children, at the end of the day it’s your choice. I’m truly, truly against [the notion] that this is an invasion and brainwashing. What’s this brainwashing? Are we animals? We’re not animals, we’re not a type of ape. You make the choice. You like it.”

But El Aawar admits that children often do not really have a say in the matter. They want the toys. They want the playground. “The child is so pure and innocent,” he says. And McDonald’s give it to them, playing on children’s desires by offering these rewards, by putting playgrounds in places where there are none. McDonald’s gets them when they’re young, then tries to keep them for life.

“We build a McDonald’s culture,” says Mansour, who worked his way from scrubbing the toilets of his uncle’s restaurant in Maadi to heading some 50 outlets nationwide. “We have kids come again with their parents. And they come in for the Happy Meal. That’s how we bring them in. Hopefully, these kids that come and eat your Happy Meal; 30 years down the line, they are gonna bring their kids. That’s how you build the culture.

“And that’s how you teach people,” he continues. “And that’s how McDonald’s tries to teach people. The ultimate goal is to reach [the point] where instead of reminiscing about the club you used to go with your father or mother or grandfather, you are reminiscing about how you used to go and sit in McDonald’s.”

McHealth

McDonald’s is often the target of criticism for serving unhealthy food, and whether that criticism is justified or not is still a controversial topic. Fast food restaurants were not the first and certainly will not be the last places that serve food that can be bad for you. The response from the food industry has always been that people have to learn about health and make appropriate decisions for themselves.

“McDonald’s did not invent bad health,” El Aawar says. “It was part of the nature; the oil, the shortening was there. The beef patty was already there, they just put the combination [together.] It’s part of everything that’s going bad. Business ethics are going down the drain. Even food.”

In his book Super Size Me, (and, later, the documentary of the same title), Morgan Spurlock goes on a 30-day McDonald’s binge in which he eats only the foods McDonald’s offers on its menu. He has a few rules: He must eat three meals a day and he must limit the amount of exercise to the same as the average American working in an office setting: about 5,000 footsteps per day.

He visits doctors through the experiment, who give him modest warnings in the beginning that his cholesterol would likely rise, as would his triglycerides, the building blocks of fat in the body. Elevated triglycerides are often associated with heart disease and, sometimes, diabetes.

After 30 days, Spurlock gained almost 25 pounds, his cholesterol went up 65 points, he doubled the risk for heart disease and heart failure and experienced fits of depression and mood swings. And even more unexpectedly, tests showed he was approaching liver failure, the equivalent of going on a long-term alcoholic binge.

“If I sit and I have a Big Mac meal just sitting on my chair, yes I will get fat,” Mansour says. “Do I want that to happen? No. Does that mean I don’t wanna have Big Macs? No, I do. But I do it responsibly. You know, I have it twice a week, once a week, and I exercise regularly. That’s how your body works.”

In the film, Spurlock cites an advertisement from McDonald’s France that quoted a nutritionist saying there is no valid reason for going to McDonald’s more than once per week. McDonald’s brass in America reacted harshly, denying the statement was true.

“For someone to say McDonald’s is not healthy — is not really — it’s not diet food, let’s be honest,” Mansour says. “You’re not going to go on a diet and eat McDonald’s. You can have it once a week in that case. It’s not your everyday type of meal.”

On the issue of obesity, people have to take personal responsibility on their lives. We cannot gorge ourselves with a pound of fries and meat and a liter of cola and blame the delivery guy. In reaction to Spurlock’s film, James Painter, chairman of Eastern Illinois University’s School of Family and Consumer Sciences, made the documentary Portion Size Me, in which he argues that it’s not necessarily McDonald’s ingredients that are the problems, but the quantities on offer. The film follows two graduate students — one male, one female — who ate fast-food diets for a month. By keeping proportions to an appropriate size for their body weight, both lost weight — and saw their cholesterol numbers improve.

And while Spurlock contends that McDonald’s has to be held accountable for what he says is its role in spreading obesity across the globe, it’s questionable how much one restaurant chain — even one as trend-setting as McDonald’s — can be blamed. A 2002 study found that 47.8% of Egyptian women over the age of 20 are overweight or obese. McDonald’s is not to blame for this, since obviously half the women in the country do not eat there, but it could make it worse as it opens more outlets.McDonald’s isn’t necessarily helping by sending mixed messages: The chain claims to have healthy alternatives, but one Big Mac has the same number of calories as a salad with dressing on top. McDonald’s also sells huge soft drinks loaded with 20 teaspoons of sugar, yet its juice alternative is no better. Then there’s the addictive properties of sugar, caffeine and the opiates found in cheese.

A hamburger is probably not much worse than a shawerma or kofta, but the rapid expansion of fast food could be a warning sign that obesity will continue to rise, as it has in America, where approximately 100 million people — or fully one-third of the population — are overweight.

“If the economic situation improves and the people can afford it, I would like to take maybe 30 or 40% of the fuul and falafel market,” Mansour says. “That’s all my dream. That’s the big idea behind the picture.”

McDonald’s does its best at increasing its market share and happens to be better than anyone else at that, but, at the same, time it could be a major contributor to a number of health problems. In the final of Ritzer’s four conditions of fast food, calculability makes portions big and delivery fast, so people equate size and speed with quality. The idea is to get lots of food right away, without thinking of the consequences, and with the end result of quickly expanding waistlines as McDonald’s grows its market.

Should it stop trying to expand? To say so would be to contradict the pillars of a free-market economy. Unlike cigarettes, fast food will not kill you if consumed exactly in the manner the manufacturer intended.

But an education campaign about nutrition and some work on portion size? Well, that would be a start.

“I think there is a lot of focus on the fast food restaurants because they are mentioned more than virtually all of the other causes in most of the books and articles and studies [on] why it’s a sudden epidemic,” says John F. Banzhaff III, a law professor at George Washington University who was interviewed in Super Size Me because of his work for plaintiffs suing McDonald’s for allegedly causing their obesity. “Again, it can’t be the neighborhood restaurant. We’ve had neighborhood restaurants for hundreds of years. It can’t be the foods we eat at home. We have been eating at home for hundreds of years. Something is very different.”

McBoycott

The food at McDonald’s is not healthy, and many people eat it multiple times per week, adding to the number of ballooning waistlines. But for people here, it’s not the food or marketing that makes McDonald’s controversial, but what the company represents.

McDonald’s, you see, is a painfully easy target. There is no symbol that better represents the West in most Egyptian and Arab minds than the golden arches. When people are angry at America for its foreign policy, McDonald’s becomes the whipping boy for American evil.

It’s particularly frustrating for Mansour Group, which is not only 100% Egyptian, but also owns 100% of McDonald’s here and gets 97% of its products, excluding raw materials, from inside the country.

In 2002, McDonald’s was at the height of its unpopularity here. One of the original partners sold his share to McDonald’s in America, which made it hard for the Mansour Group to defend itself as an Egyptian company, not an American one. So it bought the remaining shares and might, by doing so, have saved the company.

“At the time, that’s what the brand McDonald’s needed — a local partner to handle the local message — and we turned it around basically. Because if it [were now] the way it was then, I’m telling you today there would not be a McDonald’s in the country,” Mansour says.

Today, Mansour says it’s generally easier to explain to people that McDonald’s does not donate to places Egyptians would disapprove of, like Israel. But sometimes, as in the case of the Danish cartoons negatively depicting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), McDonald’s is on the receiving end of public outrage completely unconnected to the company’s operations.

“I’m sure the rumor mill here is quite rampant, but then there’s stuff like that, that has no basis to be said,” says Mansour. “We don’t get our meat from Denmark. We never have, never will. We are part of a global beef program that gets its beef from Australia or Brazil and, when the law permits, England, let’s say. It really upsets somebody trying to run a company when you’re getting rumors that have no basis to be stated. One text message could reach a million people if the idea was there. Of course it hurts.”

Mansour’s response is to hold press conferences, put information on restaurant place mats and hold direct advertising campaigns. Mansour Group stands by the scruples of its company and has tried to be a benefit to the community. It recently gave ten piastres out of every meal sold to the Association of the Friends of the National Cancer Institute, donating more than LE 2 million to the cause. It also sponsored an orphanage with 120 kids throughout year by providing help with food and education.

And after reading an article in Business Today Egypt, Mansour started making plans to help with the problem of street children.

“Egypt is a wonderful country, but at the end of the day there’s a lot of problems,” he says, “and you cannot expect the government to take care of 100% of the problems. Therefore, I think any company operating successfully in the country [should] take it upon themselves to take one issue, one social issue, and try to make the country better.”

So while the rising number of big fast food restaurants means fewer people are eating at home and consumer culture is gaining influence, good things can still happen when an ethical local partner like Mansour Group is in the picture.

“If you find people saying McDonald’s is strong because America is behind it, these people are losers, mostly losers,” says El Aawar. “I challenge you that the people saying this are winners. I challenge you, for a thousand bucks. Get me a winner who nags about big competitors having support. No, because he thinks about what he can do, not how others are.” bt