Our High-Quality Ingredients
Our Guests keep coming back to Red Robin for fun and craveable Gourmet Burgers, great service and family friendly atmosphere, but not all of our Guests know all the things that we do to make sure we’re serving the highest-quality food available. We have strict standards that we believe are among the best in the restaurant business, and our suppliers are checked regularly to make sure they are meeting or exceeding our high standards of food quality.
As Gourmet Burger experts, we take great pride in serving only the best ground beef – the top 5% of all beef used in the U.S., in fact. Our ground beef is 100% select, fresh, never frozen, natural grain-fed beef that exceeds USDA standards. It is free of preservatives, additives and artificial ingredients. Finally, Red Robin uses a unique cold-chain management system in our beef supply to make sure our beef remains properly refrigerated until it arrives at our restaurants. This system uses “data loggers” that accompany our beef during transport to measure its temperature every twelve minutes, and alerts us if temperatures drop below or rises outside of our safety standards during shipment.
In addition to serving the best ground beef, Red Robin is proud to offer our Guests a wide range of high-quality ingredients including:
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Fresh produce – hand-selected by our suppliers and by our Team Members upon delivery to make sure it meets our quality standards, not only for our Gourmet Burgers, but also for the salsas, guacamole, chili and soups that we make in our restaurants.
Dressings – many freshly prepared in-house without artificial preservatives.
Steak Fries – made from the highest-quality premium potatoes, family farmed and grown in soil that is especially rich and contributes to the tenderness and great flavor of our signature Bottomless Steak FriesTM. In short, richer soil produces richer tasting Steak Fries.
Chicken Breast – all natural with no preservatives or artificial ingredients (like phosphates or benzoate) that are often found in other poultry products sold outside our restaurants.
Cod – premium, cold-water caught and hand-battered in our restaurants.
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In addition, Red Robin’s commitment to food quality includes strict standards for food safety. The safety of the food we serve is our top priority, so we handle and prepare all ingredients using safety and sanitation standards that are among the highest in the restaurant industry.
Sustainable Farming
Red Robin is proud to offer our Guests high-quality, farm fresh produce – it’s part of our Honest To Goodness quality commitment. Here are some of the ways that our growers help maintain the sustainability
and integrity of our supply chain:
Crop Rotation – Helps prevent soil disease and erosion while naturally replenishing nutrients in the soil
Hand Trimming and Thinning – Removes weeds by hand as an alternative to using chemical herbicides
Beneficial Insects – Control harmful insect populations without the use of chemical pesticides
Water Management – Maximizes efficiency of water usage and reduces water waste and runoff
Soil Treatment Programs – Maintain rich, healthy soil and balanced pH through mineral replacement and composting
Recycling & Resource Replenishment – Using recycled, recyclable and reusable materials for produce packaging and
shipping; elimination or reduction of wax or petro-chemical coatings in packaging; and sourcing packaging from
Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certified suppliers.
Animal Welfare
Red Robin is committed to supporting the humane treatment of farm animals within our supply chain. As part of
this commitment, Red Robin has established purchasing preferences to transition our egg purchases to suppliers
that do not use battery cages in egg production. (See our cage-free egg commitment.)
By the end of 2010, we intend to serve 100% battery cage-free eggs in company-owned restaurants. That represents
about 4.2 million eggs that we currently buy each year for our company-owned restaurants. In July of 2009 we achieved
our goal to have at least 30% of the eggs in our supply chain for our more than 300 company-owned restaurants
battery cage-free. In addition, Red Robin has committed to working with pork suppliers to phase out the use of
gestation grates.
As a part of our efforts to support humane treatment of farm animals in our supply chain, Red Robin has established
a working relationship with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
“We sincerely appreciate the insights and ideas that the Humane Society has shared with Red Robin,” said Susan
Lintonsmith, Red Robin Chief Marketing Officer. “We are pleased with their support for our battery cage-free egg
commitments and look forward to continuing our dialog with the Humane Society on animal welfare issues.”
Nutrition
We
believe in putting our Guests in control of their dining experience, and we encourage our Guests to customize
menu items to satisfy their dietary or nutritional preferences. On average, more than three-quarters of our Guests
tailor their Red Robin food order in some way. To help our Guests make informed nutritional choices, we offer our nutritional Customizer on our website,
so Guests can tailor menu items, even before they visit our restaurant. Red Robin’s Customizer allows Guests to
view the nutritional content of our menu items, make changes to ingredients, and immediately see the nutritional
impact of their changes. In addition to information available using our Customizer, Red Robin provides nutritional
information on our menu items where required.
Allergens
Our restaurant Team Members are trained to assist Guests who have food allergies in their selection of menu items
that can help them avoid exposure to food allergens. We have received positive feedback from many Guests with
food allergies who consistently enjoy their experience at Red Robin. Red Robin offers special menus in our restaurants
for the eight most common food allergies: egg, milk, fish, shellfish, peanuts, treenuts, soy and wheat/gluten.
When Guests share with a Red Robin Team Member their need to avoid a food allergen, a restaurant manager gets
involved in making sure the food order is properly prepared and delivered to the Guest. Our special allergen menus,
available in our restaurants, are updated regularly (every 30 days, in fact) or as frequently as necessary. Any
changes in our supply chain, menu items or ingredients are evaluated for the impact they might have on our allergen
menus, which are then revised as needed to make sure the allergen information we offer is as current as possible.
In addition to being available in our restaurants, we also offer our wheat-free/gluten-free menu on line.