Fast Food Industry Case Study

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Recommended: Effects of fast food on child obesity

Business Studies
Fallon Santowski
Assumption Convent School

News Article Analysis on the Fast Food Industry: The controversy of toys in the fast food industry.

Summary of the topic:
Toys are a big controversy towards the fast food industry. Fast food franchises such as McDonald’s give away free toys with their Happy Meals. The toys are generally made as characters out of new famous children movies or children TV shows, and often come in sets, where a customer will have to keep going to McDonald’s to get all the characters in that set. Therefore children and their parents will keep going back, just to get the toys, without realizing that the food is not nutritional and does not meet the needs of their children’s daily requirements …show more content…

In each of the articles, toys were frowned upon as being served for free with children’s meals that had little to no nutritional value. There was also emphasis on the fact that, the parents were very careless and irresponsible in the health and well-being of their children. The parents have neglected the safety of their children, by allowing them to eat foods that are high in fat, high in carbohydrates and contain a huge sugar and salt content. I have also discovered that the fast food restaurants are also not being ethical, especially in their advertisements. McDonalds and Burger King show most of their advertisements on children’s channel such as Cartoon Network. With these adverts they put emphasis on the packing of the Happy Meals and what toy you will get with this meal. These bright, vibrant and exciting colours on the packaging and the toys, invites the children to want the Happy Meal even more. The children also get an emotional desire to have this particular …show more content…

The issue of children being more attracted to the shape, colour and features of a toy as opposed to what the meal beside it looks like, is expressed in this article. The children are far more interested in the paraphernalia that they are given with their meal, that what they are with the actual meal they are being served. Studies have shown, that children are to a large extent influenced by what they see and hear in the popular culture that what they are told at home, this indicates that they may suffer from peer pressure and do not have much of a home life if they are always involved in what is going on outside of their homes. Most of the advertisements that McDonalds and Burger King send out to be aired, are mainly targeted at children, they do this by making the packaging of the meals look inviting as well as the portion size is directed to them. Dr. James Sargent who is a paediatrics professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, says that these techniques used by McDonalds and other fast food brands are misleading. This technique also means that children make lifelong emotional connections to the fast food brands and will always remember them and long do what they can to always have something from the fast food restaurants. Children under a certain age, mainly the age that the advertisements are targeted at, are unable to purchase these poor nutritional

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