The next McDonald's?

We all love fast food, but we also know that we should eat responsibly. Combine the two, and you would get...a healthy fast-food chain. With tasty, hot food that won’t kill you. That is open day and night. Sounds like something that should already exist, but Florida start-up Healthy Bites Grill can claim to be the first.

The market they’re going after is impressive: consumers spent more than $100 billion on fast food in 1998, and fast food sales are growing at a rate of more than 20% per year. Spending on natural and organic products reached $32.1 billion in 2001, up 14% from 1999. And that's only in the US!

Furthermore, forty-eight percent of US consumers use organic products at least occasionally, and retail sales of organic products—about $9 billion in 2001, are expected to grow by about 20% a year, reaching $20 billion by 2005 (Source: Healthy Bites Grill).

Healthy Bites Grills have a dining room, a fast take-out counter and the notorious drive-through. The menu includes veggie and buffalo burgers, pizza, salads, baked fries, sandwiches, a juice bar and several retail product lines of vitamin supplements and herbal remedies.

There are two outlets in Florida right now, and the company is working on a franchise program. Springwise humbly expects this global market to be bigger than just two restaurants in the Sunshine State. Someone some day is going to sell his or her healthy fast-food chain to the Burger Kings of this world. Or it might be the other way around. ;-)