NRN senior food editor Bret Thorn breaks down what you should be watching in the industry this week. Connect with him on the latest marketing trends and news at [email protected] and @foodwriterdiary. RELATED: • Pizza Hut to revamp menu • Franchisee says Pizza Hut trails in digital innovation • More food and beverage news
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Just as Pizza Hut has undergone what parent company Yum! Brands Inc. calls the biggest change in the chain’s 56 year history, adding a host of new toppings, crusts and sauces, it also is seeking to make it easier for customers to decide what to put on their pizza — in a way that critics are calling Orwellian and creepy.
The “subconscious menu” being tested in the United Kingdom uses retina-scanning analysis developed by Swedish company Tobii Technology to track customers’ eye movements over a menu to see what food they’re most interested in.
“It’s like magic, but without the weirdness,” a narrator named Tobii says in the promotional video.
But some people aren’t convinced there’s nothing weird about a computer scanning your retinae and reading your mind.
“Pizza Hut restaurants are launching a creepy new interactive menu which will watch patrons’ eyes to determine what they’d like on their pies,” notes infowars.com. The site also noted that according to Youtube comments below the promotional video, “keen diners are already drawing comparisons between the invasive and wholly unnecessary technology and the surveillance state backdrop featured in George Orwell’s 1984, in addition to the omnipresent police state depicted in the screen adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.”
Writer Adan Salazar extrapolates beyond its current use. “A possible future scenario may play out as follows: ‘You look tired. Would you like to add a Coke to your order to put some pep in your step?’” He goes on to say the perfection of this and similar technologies would be “major victories for Big Brother’s all-seeing surveillance panopticon.”
From a less dire perspective, satire newspaper The Onion points to another potential flaw in the system. In a (fake) response to a question about the technology, one person said: “I don’t know about this. My subconscious has never been very good at pairing flavors.”
Au contraire, says consumer psychologist Simon Moore, who tells The Daily Mail that the subconscious is very much involved in what we eat.
“We have quite an extensive subconscious relationship with our food and it’s certainly the case psychologically that ‘we eat with our eyes,’” he said, adding: “Quick brain responses are probably hardwired in our evolutionary survival reflex” to choose the most nutritious food.
Writer Anucyia Victor is certainly enthusiastic about the menu, calling the software behind it “incredible.”
Contact Bret Thorn: [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
