by Johnny Guatemala
Jan. 19, 2008
"Delve into mounds of whipped cream and chocolate syrup atop a decadent caramel brownie. Honestly, who's going to find out?"
The aforementioned pitch came from a laminated table card promoting Applebee's Brownie Delight, just one of several dessert ads sounding slightly sultry these days. Another table-topper at popular Tex-Mex chain, Chili's, sported, "Steamy. Scandalous. S'mores." aiming to peddle the traditional campfire fare.
Yes, it seems that desserts can't be desserts anymore without being proposed as the indulgences that they rarely are. But by treating a piece of pie like it is a forbidden desire instead of a slight excess, restaurant chains have been raking in the dough, so to speak, from any number of cheesecake-thighed office secretaries unsatisfied with their personal lives.
Restaurant industry analyst Claudia Righetti, a freelancer for trade magazine, Chef & Restauranteur Quarterly, said, "It's easy to increase revenues if you make something seem sexy, let alone borderline adulterous. Frankly, I'm afraid what's coming down the pike when a large chain like TGI Friday's or Fuddrucker's utilizes the obviously phallic reference to the traditional banana split."
Case in point, Miss Tallulah's Hotbox Slice, a standard piece of Mississippi mud pie repackaged under a hypersexualized title, has grown dessert revenues by 150% for Sticky Fingers, a regional barbeque chain in the South.
Of course, there is always the potential to oversaturate in any advertising market, or to miss the ball entirely, as Starbucks recently found. Trying to tap into the poorly-hidden closeted desires of their cable-knit-sweatered and semi-professional clients, the coffee giant was forced to remove an add for their whipped cream tart amid widespread customer shock and disbelief over this ad:
"Your horn-rimmed glasses fool no one. Lick it up, you nasty, nasty whore."
While the sexifying of desserts has been relatively new, executives at Hooters are no strangers to bringing sex into the food industry.
At the forefront of the movement, Hooters has pioneered the blurring of the distinction between sex and food. Tom Sandoval, a regional manager for the chain, highlighted the emerging market trend.
"It's been the cornerstone of our business model. Succulence and tenderness, heaping proportions, tight packaging, and a little bit of youthful naivete. That's what our food's always been about, and that's why you go to a Hooters in the first place," he said, after pausing a screening of 9 1/2 Weeks on his office television.
Although Hooters hasn't taken the first step toward marketing desserts in an alluring manner, it is willing to expand its dessert revenues with it's typically male demographic, which has largely been unaffected by the nationwide surge in dessert purchases.
"We're going to test out our new dessert menu options at test markets throughout the Northeast starting this fall," said Sandoval. "Our waitresses will be instructed to carry cans of whipped cream with them at all times in the restaurant for $2 body shots."