National fast-casual chain files Chapter 11 bankruptcy
It has been a bleak time for restaurants, but this filing was not hard to see coming.
People who eat special diets seem to have a blind spot when it comes to what other people want to eat. For many years, for example, I ate gluten-free, thinking that gluten was causing me some dietary issues,
During that period, many chains, including Dunkin', added gluten-free products, and nearly all of them quietly let the products disappear. While it's feasible for high-end restaurants to stock gluten-free pasta and charge an added fee, for other chains, it's not so simple.
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People who can eat gluten don't want to eat gluten-free pizza, even if it's acceptably okay, because regular pizza is always better.
"About one-third of Americans say that due to health concerns, they want to reduce the amount of gluten they consume, or eliminate it altogether," according to NYU Lagone.
Many of those people may be misguided, as the actual rate of Celiac disease sits at around 1%. That's too small a number to build a restaurant chain around, and efforts to entice gluten eaters with gluten-free items have never worked.
