For quick service restaurants (QSRs) despite a push from the health industry, so far the trend (of reducing salt in food products) hasn’t taken off," QSRWeb reports.
There are several obstacles standing in the way, the biggest being the supply chain, said Aaron Allen, president of Quantified Marketing Group. The supply chain has expanded to the point where operators are receiving food not only from all over the country but also from all over the world. And the best way to ensure those foods don’t spoil is to add salt. "We've engineered food to last longer and to sit on trucks and on supply shelves and to be packaged up for longer periods of time," Allen said. "And that requires sodium and other preservatives." Salt has been such an instrumental part of the food packaging process for so long that it might be hard to convince consumers that they need to cut back. "For thousands of years, that's how we preserved meats and fish and all kinds of proteins, by packing it in salt. That's part of why we crave salt so much. It's an evolutionary thing," Allen said.
The story quotes Dr. Catherine Adams Hutt, for the National Restaurant Association:
"Consumers value taste, convenience and good value first and foremost. So the restaurant industry is trying to reduce sodium where possible — and where it doesn't make a change in taste," Hutt said. "The next level will be more difficult, where you reduce sodium to the point there is a taste difference. And the consumer isn’t demanding it, so that makes it more difficult for the restaurant or manufactured goods industries to make radical changes."
The trend towards "fresh" foods in QSRs may lead to reduced sodium, the article speculates.