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Friday's CEO Richard Snead says he came around on Atkins last summer, when waiters at the company's 500 or so U.S. restaurants began to notice a big wave of customers substituting vegetables for potatoes, which left the restaurants holding a surplus of spuds and struggling to fill the side orders. "It didn't take a lot of research to understand that America was under the influence of the Atkins revolution," Snead says. Enter menu items like the Tuscan spinach dip and the tuna-salad wrap. Ruby Tuesday, which was one of the first to start serving Atkins-friendly Splenda on the table next to the traditional Sweet'n Low, Equal and sugar packets, now has some 40 low-carb items on its revamped menu.
--PUBLISHING'S PROFIT CENTER
At any given moment, a quarter of the adult population is on a diet, a figure that has remained fairly steady for decades. Not surprisingly, the publishing world has built a reliable revenue stream serving this market, pumping out titles addressing any and all diet concerns of the day. Book publishers "will jump on any bandwagon," notes Nora Rawlinson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.
They have truly swarmed this one. More than 140 low-carb books are in print, and 51 more are due out this year, up from just 15 in 1999, reports Simba Information, a publishing-research firm. The crush of new titles exploits every crevice of the low-carb market: Low-Carb Cocktails, Low-Carb Slow Cooker Recipes and Low-Carb Smoothies. There is Low-Carb Dieting for Dummies as well as The Complete Idiot's Guide to Low-Carb Meals. It was only a matter of time before a book came along to compare the low-carb diet books. When it did, in mid-January, Jonny Bowden's Living the Low Carb Life briefly displaced The Da Vinci Code as the best-selling title on BarnesandNoble.com
In all, diet and health books rang up an estimated $500 million in sales last year, and much of that loot was low-carb related. The frenzy continues to be led by Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, which has been on the New York Times best-seller list for nearly seven years. Even the upstart South Beach Diet, which hit print just last year, has spent 53 weeks on the list. Magazines are jumping on the bandwagon too. Low Carb Energy will join LowCarb Living on newsstands nationwide next month. "No one could have forecast that this cyclone was coming," says Jim Capparell, publisher of LowCarb Living. He sat on his idea for nearly a year before acting. "If this is a fad," he adds, "I hope it's as long-lived as low fat, which took 22 years to come and go."
--DIET INC. DOWNER
The diet industry is in distress. Massive numbers of dieters have migrated to low-carb strategies in the past couple of years, exiting programs that emphasize portion control. The heavyweights of the diet industry, Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, are feeling the pinch. "Any time there is anything new in the market, it is going to affect clients who want to lose weight quickly," says Cozette Phifer, spokeswoman at Jenny Craig. She concedes that new business is depressed but asserts that the dip won't last long. Both companies say they have refrained from introducing low-carb items because their nutritionists oppose the idea and think it's a fad that will fade. "We believe carbohydrates are an important part of a balanced diet," says Jim Evans, CEO of Jenny Craig.