Is this vegan Burger King the future of fast food?

13 Sep Is this vegan Burger King the future of fast food?

At a recently opened Burger King in Vienna, there aren’t any animal products on the 40-plus-item menu. The Whoppers use a vegan patty from The Vegetarian Butcher, a Dutch company; the “cheeseburgers” come with vegan cheese. The “chicken” burgers and nuggets use vegan chicken. The Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is dairy-free.

The restaurant opened as an experiment in July, following similar short pilots in the U.K., Spain, Chile, and elsewhere, including a new pop-up in Costa Rica. But it’s possible that the company could keep the Vienna location open permanently. “It’s going to be up to the guests to decide the future of it,” says Sabrina Ferretti, vice president of marketing at Burger King.

It’s been three years since the chain first piloted the meat-free Impossible Whopper on some menus in the U.S., and then launched it nationally after proving there was demand. But embrace of plant-based foods has grown even more quickly in Europe. (Last year, total retail sales of plant-based food in Europe grew to a record $2.6 billion, according to the nonprofit Good Food Institute, versus $1.9 billion in North America.)

At all Burger King restaurants in Germany and Austria, every beef burger on the menu has a vegetarian alternative. It’s an approach the company wants to take everywhere, for its whole menu. In the U.K., Burger King has committed to make half of its menu meat-free by 2030. “Our restaurants are going to be offering consumers the option to choose, for every product, either meat or plant-based,” Ferretti says. The people ordering the plant-based options aren’t necessarily vegetarian; the number of “flexitarians” who just want to eat plant-based food more often is growing in Europe. In Belgium, for example, one in three burgers sold at the chain is now plant-based.

Reworking menus like this can help shape diners’ decisions. “Providing a plant-based option for every item of the menu would be a huge step forward in making these more sustainable foods become the default choice,” says Carlotte Lucas, the corporate engagement manager at Good Food Institute Europe. In a recent campaign in Austria, the restaurant went a step further, asking diners ordering a burger, “normal or with meat?,” and temporarily making plant-based burgers the default.

The climate crisis is one of the reasons that demand for plant-based food is growing in places like Germany, where meat consumption has dropped over the past decade. Americans now eat nearly twice as much meat as Germans. The number of vegans doubled in Germany between 2016 and 2020. Unsurprisingly, fast food restaurants are following the demand. Though McDonald’s canceled its vegetarian McPlant burger in the U.S., its German restaurants still have plant-based burgers. Pizza Hut and Domino’s serve pizzas with vegan cheese.

The fully vegan Burger King might point toward the future of fast food: When plant-based alternatives become indistinguishable from their animal counterparts—as recipes improve, potentially taste better than meat, and are healthier and cheaper to make—will every chain go vegan? Ferretti says Burger King will continue to follow demand, but a fully plant-based future, if it happens, is a long way off.

“I think it’s unlikely that soon we are going to have all our guests only asking for vegan or vegetarian products,” she says. “What I see as a bigger trend is people being very diverse in their diet. Sometimes you want to have meat, sometimes you want to have non-meat based products, and that’s fine. And this is probably where I see the biggest opportunity for Burger King, to make sure that we can cater for all different needs. So it’s more about diversifying our offering.”

Source: Fast Company