Arby's Launching New "Fast Casual" Chain

Atlanta-based Arby's is test marketing a "fast casual" restaurant called Arby's Market Fresh that expands on its current signature Market Fresh products with a lineup of sandwiches, salads typically found in eateries such as Panera Bread Co. and Doc Green's Gourmet Salads.

The new chain will feature Cuban sandwiches, deli wraps, feta cheese, peanut cole slaw, kalamata olives, and made to order salads. There are two experimental Market Fresh restaurants that have opened their doors not far from corporate headquarters around Atlanta. The firm told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution :

"It's our entry, our key to the [fast-casual] door," Amy Alarcon, Arby's director of product development, said recently at the chain's newly opened store in an upscale shopping center in Roswell. "It's Market Fresh amped."

 The fresh "fast casual" market is a hot spot of growth.

"Over the past five years, fast casual has grown about 15 percent annually, compared with about 4 percent for the rest of the industry, said Joe Pawlak, vice president of Technomic, a Chicago-based restaurant industry consulting firm. And there is room to grow, Pawlak said. While the overall restaurant industry earned $331 billion in 2005, fast-casual sales were about $8 billion."