I have to admit, when I go to Ikea I order the Swedish meatballs. And I seem to like lingonberries.
Would I go to an Ikea cafe if it was a stand alone place out on the boulevard?
Maybe.
How could Ikea have missed such an opportunity for so long? “This might sound odd, but it’s almost something we didn’t notice,” says Michael La Cour, Ikea Food’s managing director. It turns out that Ikea’s main home-goods business is so vast—the company racked up $36.5 billion in revenue last year—that the comparatively small sales impact of lox sandwiches and chocolate cake got lost. “But when I started putting the numbers into context of other food companies, suddenly I could see, well, it really is not that small.” Ikea Food had annual sales of about $1.5 billion in 2013.
La Cour’s team set about examining every part of Ikea’s food business, applying the same kind of thinking the company uses for its furniture business. Leveraging its scale, it streamlined the supply chain, forging a key partnership with a sustainable salmon farm in Norway, along with signing on similarly vetted providers of coffee and chocolate. It moved to aggressively reduce waste—which is down by 30% so far in test locations—by implementing data-analysis tools that determine more precisely how much food to prepare. And it applied the company’s core principles of “democratic design” to the menu, emphasizing elegant form, high quality, sustainability, and, of course, low prices when concocting new culinary products. (Ikea has since become a major global purveyor of certified-sustainable seafood. Less momentous but still significant to jam fans: It’s also Sweden’s biggest exporter of lingonberries.)
We don’t have Ikea here–is their food actually any good?
It’s good in this context –
“I’m a little bored righ… hey, they have a cafeteria!!”
Takes about 30 minutes to set one up. And all you need is an Allen wrench! 🙂
But there will be an extra booth for some reason.
“Sustainable” always cracks me up as a Lefty hipster buzzword.
“Sustainable” chocolate sources? Um, sure, rest easy, nervous Snowflakes.
Cue the ‘vintage 60s BBC parody documentary depicting the Italian “linguine harvest season” when the Pasta Farmers pluck the ripened linguine strands from ancestral Pasta Trees. (Cook and Moore? Early Python?)
Bon appetit.
You sit down and order a tasty lunch then look on in puzzlement as your cutlery is a set of Ikea allen keys and you’re missing your lingonberries
It’s good in the context of “Hey, the meal is free this weekend if we buy over $100.00 worth of merchandise!”
The Atlanta Ikea restaurant is like an auxiliary cafeteria for Georgia Tech students. IKEA cafeterias would probably do okay in college towns.
Hope they will also sell replacement specimens of the mock bamboo at their food chains. 🙂
One thing about the meatballs that pissed me off: Used to be you got about a dozen, with potatoes and lingonberries. Now, they’re serving 8 meatballs with potatoes, lingonberries, and some mixed vegetables. And they won’t let you trade the vegetables for more meatballs. I don’t know hiw well that will work outside their showrooms.
Is this Sweden’s answer to NoKo? They want to launch stand alone missiles.
@Rufus T: Is this it?
1957 Spaghetti Tree Hoax, BBC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
After their fag ads they can keep their cafes.
And their junk furniture.
Never been in one, but I will go out of my way to NEVER go into one.
(fag or Ikea)
izlamo delenda est …
Tim, I just LOL’ed at your last sentence.
The scientific name for lingonberry is Vaccinium vitis-ikea. Well, almost.
The stand-alone restaurants are doomed. People will take one look at the wall menu with over-simplified line drawings of the dishes and immediately go to McDonalds or Burger King where the food is shown in gorgeously Photoshopped splendor.
“lingonberries”? Isn’t that a Swedish dingleberry?
Do their stacked sandwiches fall over on people?
This’ll be huge! How many international halal restaurant chains are there?
“How many international halal restaurant chains are there?”
Don’t know, but Ikea won’t be one of them. There’s pork in them meatballs. Take that out, and they’re doomed.
@Flip, good catch, that’s the clip, thanks for posting it.
I swear I’ve never seen a “lingonberry “.
Bet I’m not the only one here who thinks it founds like some Garrison Keillor/ Lake Woebegone story punchline.
Considering their furniture, this should be the only thing they ever produced that can stand alone.
I love the Swedish meatballs. And the frozen yogurt in a cone for just a buck is so good that I’ve gotten off Interstate 95 in New Haven to grab one when I wasn’t even going to IKEA.
Crazy, because I hate yogurt but this thing tastes like a Carvel cone. How’d they do it?
Tha phuck is a lingonberry? And no, I’m not gonna look it up.
Didn’t know they made food.