Halal Carts: Understanding the Vernacular and the Branded in Street Food Culture
A walk down any street in Manhattan is met with flocks of of rushed New Yorkers, yellow cabs zooming their way through the usual traffic, and the smell of exotic spices and the sound of metal clangs as vendors scrape off the halal meat off their kitchen tops. These Halal carts have become a symbol of the strong international presence in this city and the effect of immigration on the contemporary food market. Amongst this large sea of Middle Eastern street carts, however, one seems to be ahead of the wave, with red and yellow carts making it visible from several blocks away. It’s The Halal Guys. They have achieved substantial success in comparison to the other more localized contenders who have little or no ‘brand identity’ given the scale of their business model. Thus, we can raise the question: is branding a market a definite marker of success? Through the lens of the Halal Cart, we can understand and examine the effect of the branded versus the vernacular food business model, as well as the correlation between graphic design and building trust in a brand.
Branded Success Versus Vernacular Stagnation
Halal Carts first began to establish their presence in the late 1980s and have continuously increased in multiplicity since then. A study conducted by Queens College shows that the number of carts rose from almost 70 to 560 in around 15 years. When they first launched their cart in 1990, The Halal Guys predominantly sold hot dogs, as explained on their website. During that time, New York was witnessing a massive influx of Arab and South Asian immigrants who were mostly employed as taxi drivers. Due to the grueling long hours of their shifts, these drivers needed a more filling meal than a hotdog to sustain them, and given the fact that they were mostly Muslim, the food had to be halal, or permissible to be consumed by Muslims. To clarify, Muslim food entails all meat, poultry, and fish (exculding pork) which have been prepared as prescribed by Muslim law.
This single cart business soon transformed into a franchise of two restaurants and five carts in New York City, and a national restaurant chain. How is it that The Halal Guys have uniquely achieved this immense commercial success, although they are essentially serving the same products as all the other halal carts, with very little variations? Could it be because these other carts remained small and ‘unbranded’ in contrast to the recognizable yellow and red carts of The Halal Guys?
By examining the effect of branding through the lense of the halal cart, we can question the effect of the branded versus the vernacular business model. The Halal Guys, or the branded food cart, has been met with a higher level of commercial success than the other ‘unbranded’ and stagnating carts that remained modestly and vernacularly designed. This serves as an interesting lens to look at the effect of having a recognizable visual branded identity on monetizing a business and ultimately leading to success.
Graphic Design, Food, and Trust
In the International Journal of Food Design, published by the University of the Arts London, titled “Telling Stories: The Role of Graphic Design and Branding in the Creation of ‘Authenticity’ within Food Packaging,” author Alison Barnes elaborates on the impact of graphic design on the authentic quality of a food brand. To strategists, the driving factor of a food brand’s success is whether the customer trusts enough to eat their food or not, and that is dictated by whether they deem it as authentic or not (Barnes, 184). This is when graphic design comes into play and persuades the consumer to order the food. Thus, the success of a brand essentially is dictated by how authentic it is deemed by the consumer.
The brand also visualizes the personality of the product and in turn creates an emotional and personal connection with the consumer. This connection is made possible through the customer’s visual perception of the product, by means of graphic design, marketing, and other branding elements such as copyrighting and establishing a tone of voice.
However, establishing authenticity is a two fold process in which not only the design constructs, but also the impact of the consumer who’s reactions will impact its success, and thus, the truthfulness of its authenticity. Could it be that The Halal Guys is seen as the most authentic out of all the other carts? Is it authentic because it delivers accurate Middle Eastern street food, or some version of it? Or is it deemed as so because it was simply the first to create ‘American Halal Food’ and overtime set the standards and guidelines for it?
A main reason for their success could be that they were the first to get ahead in their game. As stated on their website, The Halal Guys claim to have created this niche genre of cuisine termed as “American Halal Food,”and by incorporating that phrase into an actual brand framework and commercializing it, it stuck with the public. Other than being the first in introducing this food concept, they were also the first to set a visual design to accommodate it. Being the first in introducing a new food concept, selecting the signature colors to associate with it, and finally transforming a makeshift, vernacular niche market into a national franchise and multi million business, with dine in restaurants spread out across the country, equipped with organized assembly lines, set it apart from the rest.
First Things First, Who are The Halal Guys?
The striking red and yellow identity of The Halal Guys is recognizable from several blocks away. From the colors of the bags that contain your food, to the umbrellas shadowing the carts, and down to the tables at their newly opened restaurants, these two main colors are vividly dominating the space on the street and in their restaurants.
The street cart transformed into an international fast food franchise when its founders made a deal with Frasnmart, a food and beverage franchise development group, in 2014. When asked about how he scouts brands and decides to invent in them, Dan Rowe, Fransmart’s CEO, stressed on ‘authenticity.’ But is Halal Guys truly authentic, or were they the first to create an entirely new food concept of American Halal Food in the American market? (Danovich, Street Meat) Probably not, but they are definitely an innovative pioneer of a new type of fast-casual cuisine, and owning that in itself can be paralleled to the strength emulated by authenticity.
The main logo of the franchise is a simplified iconographic abstraction of a traditional Middle Eastern Shawarma rotating rotisserie, in which slices of meat are shaved off. This pictograph is encircled with full uppercase phrases set in a Serif typeface. Similar to their bright colors, the photographic style present on their website, mobile application, and menus is also vivid and highly saturated in color. The visual identity itself is resonant of typical Western food branding motifs, with the most obvious correlation of the red and yellow colors, symbols of American fast food culture.
The almost instant correlation made with these colors is one with the McDonalds logo, and so many other American fast food brands such as Burger King and Carl’s Jr. By abiding to the already existing color codes of fast food culture, The Halal Guys created a familiar feel to customers who are already accustomed and automatically attracted to such colors, given their association and multiplicity. In their initial logo, the color blue was present and the red and yellow tones were much paler and subdued. But now, the blue is omitted and the red and yellow have become saturated and bright, just like the rest of American fast food logos. These colors denote consistency and predictability in quality, cheap prices, convenience, and fast service. By doing so, The Halal Guys shifted their focus from just targeting Muslim Arab taxi drivers and onto much larger Western dominated audiences to maximize profit. They ultimately shifted their user group over time.
On their main logomark, their products are summarised in the phrase “Gyro and Chicken.” In fact, Gyros are not Middle Eastern or Egyptian- they’re essentially Greek. The Arab equivalent to that is Shawarma, which is what the Halal Guys serve, yet call it something else. Perhaps it is because the New York consumers that they are serving are more familiar with the notion of the Gyro given the large influx of Greek immigrants that long ago dominated the street food scene in the city, and thought that this word would be more appealing or resonant among their everyday consumers.
Delving deeper into The Halal Guys’ food identity, most of it is not even traditional Arabic food as they typically advertise themselves. In a New York Magazine article titled “How Street Meat Conquered New York,” Priya Krishna states: “The food is prepared by Egyptians, but is far from traditional Egyptian cuisine with staple dishes like lentils mixed with rice and macaroni, or mashed fava beans.” Shawarma meat and falafel never top off rice and are never accompanied with such sauces. Traditionally, the shawarma has two strict formulas: a beef shawarma with parsley, tomatoes, white onion with sumac, and tahini sauce, or a chicken shawarma with pickles, french fries, and garlic sauce.
These are the recipes for shawarma sandwiches all over the Middle East, with little variations depending on the country. However, unusual pairings are found in their dishes. For instance, lettuce is unheard of in a traditional shawarma sandwich. Interestingly, Gyros are greek and are rarely ever halal given the fact that Christian Greeks do not have to eat halal like Muslims. Many think that it’s a type of cuisine or food, but in fact, it is a religious process prescribed by Muslim Law that allows for the blessed or non-shameful consumption of meat. Thus, a “halal gyro” is a cultural and religious paradox in itself.
The “Halal Gyro” Paradox
The “halal gyro” oxymoron makes it evident that the food identity and menu items have been customized and tailored for the Western consumer and what they are typically accustomed to. “Though an estimated 95 percent of its customer base is not Muslim, each new franchise is using certified halal meat, a fact that’s proudly displayed on the Halal Guys’ website.” (Danovich, Street Meat) Some carts have the word ‘halal’ written in Arabic, but The Halal Guys have completely and quite naturally omitted the use of the original language just because of the context they are positioned in. It is interesting to see how a Muslim Arab product completely omits its primary language, but understandably does so because of the environment it is existent in.
The Halal Guys began serving Muslim-Arabs specifically, but it stopped catering to this initial target audience and changed its food identity to target everyone in order to maximize profit. Expanding their user group to non-arabic speakers meant that having the original language written served no point and the Arabic in this Arab design identity no longer served a need. A question of intentionality versus convenience definitely takes play here.
Evidently, the core of this identity was highly created due to the context it was positioned in, from having the shawarma referred to as the more familiar ‘Gyro’, the complete omission of Arabic, and the unusual combination of meats and rice. It is interesting to see how the language and culture of a product is positioned into a completely different context, and in that alienating process, the visual design is dictated by the needs of this external environment. It is as though a visual identity was created out of the space the brand was positioned into. And truly, the halal cart becomes a symbol of immigrant culture and English Arab bilingual design in a western context.
What About the Other Carts?
To grasp a better understanding of the success of The Halal Guys, I surveyed other less prominent halal carts to learn the similarities and differences of these carts despite their scale. It feels as though there is a cart on every street corner in Manhattan. So to limit my surveying, I mapped the carts within a 0.3 mile radius from the New School University Center on 63 5th Avenue.
I found seven carts, four of which were all on 14th Street naturally given how busy that street is. After mapping location, I observed and photographed them to study their visual identity or ‘branding’. I discovered that these carts were all one offs rather than multiple-location franchise carts, except for Rafiqis, which is still much smaller than The Halal Guys. Most of these carts were in red and yellow, perhaps imitating their infamous competitor. Text typed on an arch or heavily outlined with drop shadow were all present on all of these carts. In most instances, Egyptian pop music is on full blast. One thing that they had which The Halal guys didn’t was colorful LED screens with moving text of the menu items.
Another thing that made them different from Halal Guys is their very expansive menus. Indeed, they offered the typical bowls of rice and chicken wraps, but they also offered burgers, hot dogs, cheesesteak sandwiches, and much more non-Halal things that have now become Halal. But perhaps their efforts in reaching wider audiences by adding more irrelevant items to their identity actually does harm to the business because it taints authenticity. The Halal Guys, on the other hand, have a fixed menu with very few options, and the menu has remained unchanged until this day.
These carts are practically indistinguishable from one another to the fleeting New Yorker, and only become recognizable after close scrutiny or becoming a frequent customer. Indeed these carts look like each other, so we ask how do the consumers differentiate them? Or what dictates their go to choice? Most likely, it is where these carts are positioned and what is most convenient to the given the fact that the food resemble each other.
It’s as though we end up with a brand identity kit, a set of guidelines and graphic tools that these carts utilize in order to design or brand themselves. Did their un-uniqueness arise from imitation of each other? They’re not even franchises, so why are they all abiding to a constraint of set rules that they set for themselves?
The Keys to Success, or Not
An article titled “Why Some Halal Carts Fail and Others Succeed” mentions how some halal cart vendors make as little as 10$ profit within a 4 hour time span, in comparison to the Halal Guys who make that every few minutes or so. The competition between these halal carts has definitely gotten more aggressive.
The Halal Guys pride themselves with their slogan: “We are Different” — but are they really? What sets them apart if they essentially serve the same food, packaged in the same colors? Maybe it is because they were the first to create this identity, and the other carts imitated it and utilized it as a template hoping it would achieve a similar level of success and earning like the original designed cart. But over time and naturally by adding their personal touches, the design variables morphed and changed to create much more complex visual systems that seem to have become implemented quite universally on all these carts.
Another factor to their success is location. Carto, a software and cloud service specialized in location intelligence and mapping, published an article that shows how the location-dependant business model highly affects success and influences where customers decide to eat among competing vendors. Busy points of transit such as Grand Central Station and Times Square were locations in which food carts generated the most profit. After observing the other halal carts over periods of time, I understood why they were all located in such close proximity to each other on 14th street. Although the closeness to one another might make competition more aggressive, the density of the foot traffic outweighs the competition.
Given the nature of a cart’s mobile ability, they are free to move and position themselves where there is the most foot traffic. The Halal Guy’s main cart location on Sixth Avenue seems to be stagnant in time and has remained the same since, operating as a static shop rather than a mobile cart or truck. That cart has strategically positioned itself in a prime location. Apparently, there is an “imposter cart” positioned on the corner of 53rd street and 6th Avenue where the main Halal Guys cart is, that mimics their yellow and red identity as well, and two other carts exist on that street as well. In this specific scenario, the location factor can be dismissed; two halal carts, one branded and the other unbranded, are positioned right next to each other, yet, the branded cart of The Halal Guys is still people’s first choice.
Another factor that contributes to their success is due to customer feedback and their popularity among the consumers who prize the brand not only for its novelty, but also for its affordability and convenience. The most trustworthy ad to consumers is recommendations by friends and colleagues, and that definitely aids in expediting sales. Seeing long queues outside a place is a visual signifier that means “yes, this place is worth the wait,” and that induces a domino effect in which people will join the line because they assume that there is a grand reward awaiting at the end of the line. They don’t really care about the design because they are here for the sole convenience of its speed, cheap price, and location. Those facts seem to bear more importance to the average Halal Guys customer who is not really buying their chicken over rice platter because they particularly like the logo or the typography on the menu, or other brand elements. Instead, they are there because of what the brand itself awards them with- physically with satiation, and emotionally with satisfaction of the good tasting food.
The Final Bite
Branding a street food cart and strategizing its identity definitely has an impact on its success as it creates a more trustworthy relationship with its consumers. Consistency, be it in food expectations or visual design, is comforting to the customer and having the guarantee of knowing what to expect when they come back for more is a definite driver for a strong customer base, ultimately leading to trust.
After all this research, it is evident that there are several factors as to why the Halal Guys were more successful than their competitors. Their novelty due to the fact that they started and popularized a new genre of ‘American Halal Food’, their prime location on the extremely busy corner of 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue, and the customers’ positive reactions and cycles of recommendations all amount to factors of success. However, the factor that ultimately ties all of these conditions together is the presence of their clear, visual design system and brand. Because they were the first to create this food genre, they were also the first to design for it, and in turn that created a standard or set of guidelines that the other carts imitated. The red and yellow colors of their brand also plays a huge part in attracting people walking on that very busy street. Lastly, because their brand following the color conventions of American fast food culture, they offered that consistency and comfort with knowing what to expect, as well as fast service and cheap prices. Thus, the brand truly resonated with people, demonstrating the strong effect of a graphic design system on branding food, building trust, and making a business successful.
It is evident that The Halal Guys have a clear design system and brand guidelines, in the traditional sense of a ‘brand,’ while the other more localized carts were designed in an impromptu manner. However, those other carts attract customers not by their strong visual identity or recognizable logo and packaging, but because of convenience in location, and discovery. Their customer base does not rely on trust established through the consistency achieved by graphic design, but rather by that achieved through the consistency of the food quality itself. Designer Daniel Van Der Velden states in his paper titled Research and Destroy that “anyone can call himself a designer.” Indeed, the vendors at these smaller carts designed a system that works for them, one without logos and brand guidelines, but with ethos, convenience, and consistency through nonvisual means.
Resources
Barnes, Alison. “Telling stories: The role of graphic design and branding in the creation of ‘authenticity’ within food packaging.” International Journal of Food Design, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, p. 183+. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link-gale-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/apps/doc/A517807781/AONE?u=nysl_me_newsch&sid=AONE&xid=8387c25c. Accessed 6 Nov. 2019.
Danovich, Tove. “Street Meat: The Rise of NYC’s Halal Cart Culture.” Eater, 10 July 2015, https://www.eater.com/2015/7/10/8924449/halal-cart-street-food-meat-nyc-cheap-eats.
Murray, Peter. “Site Planning and Revenue Prediction: Optimizing Food Truck Locations in New York City.” CARTO Blog, CARTO, 1 July 2018, https://carto.com/blog/optimizing-food-truck-locations/.
Report, Post Staff. “The Greasy Competition among NYC’s Halal Street Carts.” New York Post, New York Post, 8 Sept. 2014, nypost.com/2014/08/16/the-greasy-competition-among-nycs-halal-street-carts/.
Velden, Daniel van der. “Research & Destroy A Plea for Design as Research.” Metropolis M, Issue #2, 2006, http://veryinteractive.net/content/2-library/53-research-destroy/ vandervelden-research-destroy.pdf
