Major Restaurant Chain to Make Food More ‘Instagram Friendly’

Social media and "food porn" have become such a force in the culinary world that one chain is going out of its way to cater to food bloggers and Instagram users.

We've all been there: you see something on a commercial or a photo on a menu and you decide you must have that food in and around your face area immediately. You order it with high hopes and sit in anticipation for the moment when that wondrous vehicle of calories explodes with flavor in your mouth.

And then it shows up and it looks like someone dropped it and let it roll down a sidewalk before being stepped on with extreme prejudice by Brock Lesnar. The burger is a flat gray color, the bun is lip and flat, the fries are burnt. Maybe it's a salad, with wilted lettuce, or drowned in dressing.

There's no way you're sharing this mess on your Instagram; you wouldn't want to let your followers down. All 37 of those people are relying on you to have top quality food photography, after all.

Fear not! Chili's Restaurants are doing what they can to make sure you're never going to find yourself in this swamp of disappointment again:

“We look a lot more at how the food is presented,” Wyman Roberts, chief executive officer of Chili’s parent company Brinker International Inc., said in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York.

Chili’s is angling for a class of customer it calls “the new school.” These diners aren’t necessarily millennials -- the generation that restaurant chains all seem to be chasing -- but they are forward-thinking, Roberts said. And sharing the dining experience with social-media friends is part of that.

Chili’s sees Instagram as an extension of its marketing, he said.

 

Chili's gets free advertising, your Instagram followers think you're a "foodie." Win-win!