Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide

I don't want these "Impossible" burgers to eliminate veggie burgers doing their own thing, and I'm a bit worried it might eventually come to the point where everyone thinks they need to be just like beef.

Some of the existing veggie burgers are very tasty even though they don't try to trick your taste buds in replicating the 'meat experience' 100%. Like Morningstar Farms Tomato & Basil Pizza burgers are just awesome, for example. They're one of my mainstays for super-quick lunches. You can see and taste the veggies in the burger and they taste great.

And I'm saying this as a meat eater, who grilled beef hamburgers on the grill just last night

In general I agree with you, though I will say that the Impossible burgers are just plain good. I order them over meat when I get the chance, and I'm not a diet activist. They just made a good product.

The best is the cuisine from countries that have a large vegetarian population. For example at the cafeteria where I work they have samosas served with something made with chickpeas, which doesn't leave me feeling like I missed meat with my lunch.

I'm not a vegetarian at all (I eat a lot of various meats, love'em) but I genuinely like veggies, too, and I fully agree with you. The best vegetarian dishes are the ones that work with the best flavors of whatever ingredients are present, not ones that try and pretend to be something else. You can get some very savory flavors with mushrooms, gluten, etc that are wonderful all on their own.

That being said, I've been reading enough about the impossible burger that I'm looking forward to getting to try one.

As a fellow vegetarian, I agree with not liking non-meat meat products that are too close. But, my transition was a long one. My family was very much carnosaur. I was told that I need to "expand my horizons," which meant eating new and different types of animals. (I not many that I haven't tried.) When I met my wife to be, who was vegan, that made me rethink my diet. She introduced me to many new cuisines, notably Indian and Thai, that feature dishes not based around meat.

At first, it was deciding what new vegetarian things to try, and what choices I was going to give up. I've come to realize that a lot of people identify with food. For some, it's a family thing to have a big burger. For others, whatever non-meat products they have had gave bad experiences. I can't tell you how many people I've met who say tofu is horrible. To be fair, most places or people have no clue properly prepare it; thus, the very idea of a non-meat substitute is killed.

I've tried the burger. It's impressively too close to the real thing for me to want to eat them. Yet, it is my hope that the impossible burger will be one of many avenues for people to make a transition to a more sustainable, ethical and healthier diet. In turn, I hope it ups the game for other companies to look at vegetarian options that are prepared well.

I see this getting said a lot but I really don't find this, I mean there are loads of standalone fantastic vegetable products which are nothing to do with meat and taste great but No Chick Fillets (in a Jalfrezi) have confused dinner guests who thought they were eating chicken until I told them they were vegan, or No Bull Mince (in a bolognese), Beyond Meat burgers have been well received (although I personally don't find them as nice as burgers which I can still recall from before coming vegetarian).

I guess one thing I find is it is easy to find really good recipes of long running favourite dishes and be able to substite our chicken, or beef mince with a vegan alternative and still get the full rich flavours of the dish, with the right texture, filling power, protein levels, etc of what would have been meat.

FWIW here are some of "my" recipes (ones I have found elsewhere and catalogued together on one place) which have been well received by family and guests: https://www.copymethat.com/recipebox/steven-craft/3775240/ if there is any mention of meat then substitute with the products mentioned above.

Isn't this just a criticism of existing meat-alike products? Or have you tried impossible burger and found it not tasty?

Maybe its the "uncanny valley" phenomenon for taste? When you get closer to taste of the real thing, people notice the differences more. But people like something totally different like a TJs veggie masala burger for what it is.

I am with you 100%, I wan't a veggie patty for the veggies, not as a replacement for meat.

My problem stems from the fact that I'm not vegetarian, I am always comparing the meatless burger patties with the "meatful" variety, and they never compare. I've had Impossible burgers and the Beyond Meat burgers, and they just aren't the same.

Yep. I first tried black bean burgers when I was first moving towards being vegetarian years ago. Now, I still prefer them to the meat substitutes I’ve had (which don’t yet include Impossible or Beyond Meat) because black beans + spices works very well with all of the traditional American burger condiments and dressings, and adds its own enjoyable flavor. Beats the pants off of the dense, grain-heavy fake meats I’ve sampled.

I was never a foodie though, so I think the format of a hamburger matters as much to me as the substance, being a kind of comfort food due to the familiar experience. Those of you with more refined palates are welcome to hold this position in contempt.

Trying to replicate meet is essential to have a market-fit product. We have evolved into subconsciously LOVING meet. Hadn’t the vegan-chicken tasted like chicken I wouldn’t stopped eating chicken.

I was visiting a sister when she tricked me into eating a vegan replacement of chicken!(I’m a steak lover and always made jokes about vegan people) I couldn’t believe what I was eating wasn’t chicken. Then she made me try chicken nuggets, and OMG...having had that experience with chicken, I wouldn't be surprised if their burger tastes the same...

The taste of chicken was so real I couldn't believe it. I’ve been eating it for a month now and I lost 10 lbs. WITHOUT working out.

I agree. Even as a meat-eater, some of the vegetarian fare such as certain types of gardenburgers are delicious in their own right. They aren't really trying to be meat, and I suspect I'd like them less if they were.

My wife was diagnosed with celiac last year, and we've found the same to be true of eating GF alternatives. Foods that try to replicate gluten tend to be much worse than things that are just good without it.

What I find ironic is that the industry is so focused on thinking that people only eat meat because of the taste. Not because of all the valuable micro-nutrients, varied animal proteins, and fat.

I'm very curious about people in your camp -- those that don't like attempts to replicate meat, but do like the "patty" food format. How do you usually eat your meat replacements? On a sandwich? Chopped up? A mix? Since it seems like they are all frozen (but maybe I'm wrong here?), is a big part of the draw convenience? Is protein content a factor in your decision at all?

I've always said the same thing. I like tofu when tofu is being tofu, but not when it's trying to be something else.

What are you favorite meat replacements that don't try replicate meat? I'd be interested in trying some :-D

The uncarnine valley.

After a month of Whole30 eating a couple years ago, I've completely switched from dairy in my coffee. Previously, I always used sugar and half-and-half, but a month was enough to make a permanent change.

My favorite by far is unsweetened cashew milk, followed by hazelnut and coconut, but I'm using it as a creamer or latte substitute, not looking for foam. I can't stand the nutty grittiness of almond milk in my coffee, but I now generally prefer nut milks to cow milk and cream.

Almond milk in coffee makes it taste like disgusting hot bitter marzipan imo.

I am decidedly not a coffee snob, but agree that almond milk in coffee isn't great. I've tended to use coconut milk because it has some creaminess to it that seems to work well in coffee.

I'll have to see if I can find oat milk to try.

My grandma actually makes her iced coffees with almond milk. I don't care for the taste, but I'm usually against adding anything to coffee in the first place (on the rare occasion that I actually pick coffee over tea).

> there are quite a few non-dairy creamers that work great

As someone who has tried a lot of non-dairy creamers, I have yet to find a single one that "works great". There's something very characteristic about both the taste and the consistency of milk and most replacement products are nowhere close. That's not to say milk is irreplaceable for all applications, but there's a tendency to over-hype healthy and organic replacement products that try to be "just as good" because we all want a sustainable, healthy replacement without sacrificing anything at all, but belying reality is hardly going to get us there.

Personally, I feel more attracted to the idea that it's better to do something than nothing at all. You don't have to go vegan tomorrow, if people just ate less meat and started thinking about this type of stuff as a luxury and not a right, we would've come a long way. Personally, milk in my coffee is non-negotiable. Bacon for breakfast? Well, I hardly need it every day, or even every week, so I'm open to discuss frequency.

Many mainstream "Non-dairy" creamers, like Coffee Mate and International Delight, usually have dairy in them though, specifically, caseinate. So not suitable for strict vegans. It's a quirk in labeling laws that products that have milk-derived ingredients can be labeled non-dairy as long as they label the milk-derived ingredients as milk-derived in the ingredients list.

That being said, they do make vegan creamer, never had any myself. It's still a specialty product though, most places that serve coffee, beyond coffee shops, are only going to have milk, half and half, and Coffee Mate/International Delight.

This may sound ridiculous but what I really want to try is an Almost Impossible burger. The flavor and texture of a regular Impossible burg was a bit off from a regular burger but still tasty and close to an all beef experience. I wonder if mixing in a small percent of beef will still achieve the goal of drastically cutting meat consumption while still giving beef consumers their fix.

That was conventional knowledge for those "in the know" for the last couple years but I recently read a pretty big study which disputes this too: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/03/eggs-cholester...

Which sucks because I really enjoyed eating tons of eggs for the few years where people thought they were actually not bad for you

Except there is. You've been fooled by the egg industry shills.

https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/03/22/the-effects-of-dietary...

My understanding is that the vast majority of cattle (80%?) in the United States is raised in factory farms; the vast majority the meat Americans available to purchase grocery store, served in restaurants, and processed for fast food, is sourced from those same farms.

And my understanding is that the conditions would be horrific by almost any standard: the animals are kept confined, in extremely cramped and nasty conditions, often unable to move or turn around, all day and every day, seldom or never permitted to roam. (I'm ignoring the whole antibiotics overuse question.)

When they're ready for slaughter, they're crammed into trucks and transported for hundreds of miles, in all weather, standing in their own feces. Exhausted, terrified, and freezing or overheated after transport, many are shocked with electric prods or beaten to force them back out of the trucks. Then they are hit with bolt guns to "stun" them, after which their throats are slit.

The lucky cows are unconscious before they are sawed apart, but you can bet that the types of workers who do these dirty, low-paying jobs, hundreds of times per day, as quickly as possible, without clogging up the factory line, aren't always trained well enough nor concerned whether they cause suffering.

Ranches and feed lots are different. In the US, cows are raised on ranches until 6 months before slaughter, where they are brought to a feed lot, fattened up in crowded conditions, then slaughtered

Well most of them don’t live on “ranches” for one.

As one who also grew up and currently lives in the rural Midwest - it's people not knowing what they're talking about. They hear about the awful conditions poultry are raised in and extrapolate it to all livestock.

I've driven by a few factory farms in California. You know you're close to one when you're hit with the smell of manure many miles out. When you actually drive by the farms, the reality is quite depressing: the cattle are standing in their own shit with barely any space to move. I'm done with red meat myself.

Cows have it pretty good (especially in my country Uruguay) - I absolutely understand it when you´re speaking about chicken and fish though.

The one ugly part for cattle is the slaughter, you need to have tough skin to work at a slaughterhouse.

There is a documentary called Dominion which might be interesting to you:

https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

Warning: it's quite shocking / bloody.

There's an interesting anti-meat psyop going around, coinciding with rising meat prices (Canada).

That metallic aftertaste is the only thing I found disagreeable about the Impossible Burger I tried recently. The texture wasn't exactly right, either, but it was not objectionable.

Also, if you cannot really taste the beef, you're eating crappy burgers :). My #1 trick for making an inexpensive burger palatable is to get it as a double, just to try and get enough meat for the flavor to come through.

Hi! Is there an email I can reach out to you at?

There are large agricultural subsidies on meat, and on corn (which the cows are fed). You can't make a veggie burger out of just corn, so it has to use less underpriced components.

That's development costs. With time, the infrastructure to make these burgers will be as widely available as that to make cow burgers, and that will bring costs down.

well, the product being sold is not your typical grind beans and other ingredients made into a patty. This is a genetically modified protein made to feel and taste like meat. The R&D that went into making this happen is incredibly complex. I'm confident the price will go down just as with everything else.

No, it's not. I wouldn't even say it's 5%, let alone 20%.

You only have to walk into a supermarket to see this is nonsense, meat vs veggie options are like 10 to 1.

You're referencing one widely debunked survey (this is about the vegan part of it, but it applied to the whole study and the vegetarian percentage claim (of 14%, not 20%), is discussed and debunked later in the article):

https://fullfact.org/health/vegans-uk/

I know 1 vegan and 1 vegetarian, but I know at least 6 ex-vegetarians.

Depends why they are vegan. If it’s for environmental or even ethical reasons a small amount of cross-contamination may not be objectionable as long as they personally are not contributing to demand for meat.

The UK's vegetarian rate is more like 10% as far as I recall. Since cooking veggie burgers on the same grill as meat burgers doesn't lead to additional harm to animals, I hope and expect most vegans to be happy to go for it -- veganism is not an allergy.

Veganism isn't an allergy, and it's not about maintaining perfect bodily purity. It's about making ethical choices.

Most people aren't going to worry about incidental "contamination".

Where did you get these statistics? Wikipedia shows it much differently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

> But Burger King is cooking the impossible burger on the same grill upon which they're grilling the meat.

Why is the corporate world so hopelessly stupid?

They could easily make their fries Vegan in the US, yet they haven't. I doubt they'll really bring it here.

> Vegetarians are not common outside of certain metropolitan areas in the US

There are roughly half a billion vegetarians in India.

Data or it didn't happen.

You're leaving out the cost of owning and powering a chest freezer which is not insignificant.

Tyson sold its stake in Beyond Meat last week and supposedly plans to make its own moves into this marketspace.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-24/tyson-foo...

You're linking to a website with a clear agenda, hardly a reliable source. First off, who are the billionaire ranchers and secondly, why would it be wrong for them to exist (since they exist for every other major industry, too, including tech).

- Farm land for vegetables takes up MASSIVE amounts of space, and it's not the same as leaving that land to nature and wildlife - Animals have to be killed in the production of veggie farms, from pesticides to rodents - Water doesn't get "used" up when you feed cattle with it. It goes through the same cycle it has for billions of years for all the other animal life on this planet. What gives? - Factory farms are more common for vegetables than they are for cattle, and it's not like the harvesters are getting paid any more than the ranchers. They're often paid less. 91% of cattle ranches are family owned (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2015/Cattl...)

>It is totally propped up by with subsidies from the US Government. They LOSE money on every cow slaughtered.

I don't think the math works out on that one.

This page [1] gives total meat consumption per person per year as 222.2 lb, which would be (x320 million) = 71 billion lb/year.

This page [2] gives total farm subsidies (which is a high estimate since it include all subsidies not just those to meat) as $20 billion.

So, that's $0.27/lb as an upper bound on the magnitude of the subsidy.

[1] https://www.globalagriculture.org/whats-new/news/en/32921.ht...

[2] https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

I think more needs to be done to promote grass fed beef as well. If done well, it can have a negative carbon footprint, versus imitation meats which have many of the same problems that grain fed beef does (monocropping, destruction of local ecosystems, use of pesticides, etc.).

Yes, it's sad on many levels. Never heard of a billionaire farmer though. Maybe Purdue (chicken)?

How do local farmers fall into the mix? I buy a cow every year from a local farm - they raise and slaughter the cow and deliver the whole thing butchered and packaged. I much prefer this to anything I could buy at the grocery store.

In addition to the other people who commented, I'll add that, like beef, impossible burger will vary based on the cook. So things like seasoning and level of doneness have a big impact. I'm a big hamburger fan, and I had a well seasoned, medium rare impossible burger and thought the flavor was great. Texture was different, but not bad. Anyway, I'd also recommend giving it another try.

I'd give it another go, they debuted a new version at CES back in January which people say is a lot better than the old version.

Every review I've seen has said the new version is much better, and that's just starting to roll out.

Not unusual for nyc

Burger King actually flame grills their burger patties - are you saying they are overly tough or overly burnt?

I see no reason we can't have a plant based $1.55 burger that's not superior to the meat burger on all those metrics. The plant burger doesn't have the whole animal portion of the supply chain to pay for. It seems like an economics of scale issue.

You're not going to just convince the average consumer to not buy the $1.55 burger in front of them by telling them to think about the upstream. You need to provide them with a straightforward alternative. Right now a $5 meatless burger might be able to compete with a $5 beef burger, but it's still going to lose in the $1.55 weight class.

Agreed. You might not want to build your entire diet around them but under $2USD for ~400kcal in about as balanced as a format as you can expect from a burger is pretty damn impressive. The fact that you can walk into a McDonalds on just about any continent and get said McDouble and it will be just like any other McDouble is a miracle of modern logistics and process control.

Yeah tacobell has always been super vegetarian friendly because you could just substitute beans for meat in anything

Burgers should not be served rare because of the risk of food poisoning in under-cooked minced beef. You can eat steak rare because you sear the outside, killing the bugs.

Calling it "blood" is wrong (but everybody knows what that means), but sending it back for more cooking isn't.

Some people think the risk is small enough that they're not bothered by it.

If it costs more than actual meat... then is there really another reason beyond consumer demand to do this? Because if it is costing more, imho it's likely way overpriced or potentially more harmful environmentally than the actual animal farming.

I may be wrong, but I don't think BK is advertising these as vegan or even vegetarian. They appear to be very careful to say "meatless" instead, which is not inaccurate.

They're certainly not advertising them as kosher/halal.

This is some of why it is important to distinguish moral food specifications from health-related specification: it takes work for me to eat out anywhere that isn't exclusively vegetarian because meat contamination makes me ill, and restaurants don't understand that, for example, labeling things "vegetarian" when they are fried in the same oil as meat is misleading. Sometimes the grill is well-cleaned and it is fine, and then other times I am in for a night of misery and it's just not worth the risk.

Those people aren't the target audience. It's to get meat eaters to be willing to replace meat in their diet.

I think the people who are concerned with this are familiar with how food is made at restaurants. For example, I worked at a pizza shop in high school and occasionally someone would request we wash our pizza cutter so that their veggie pizza would not be contaminated with meat from previous pizzas. We, of course, accommodated their request without issue. But I worked there for years and saw this request maybe 2-3 times. And that may have been the same customer. The people who take that level of constraint are a tiny, tiny fraction of the already smallish customer base seeking meatless/vegetarian food.

Burger King doesn't use a grill at all. They flame-broil their burgers.

I believe some (or all?) of them use a Nieco ( https://nieco.com/ ) brand broiler that basically has a metal conveyor belt that carries the patty through a flame.

See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSuLWkBt5MI

They could, if they wanted, designate one lane solely for Impossible patties (and other non-meat products).

If they don't, looks by the time the belt makes it way back through the flame, whatever residue on it will have been mostly reduced to ash. I would guess the belt wouldn't transfer meat grease and crumbs onto a veggie patty as much as a grill would. But, after it leaves the belt, it slides down to a holding area, where it would come into contact with whatever else was on the belt before it.

No person who keeps Kosher eats at Burger King. Even their restaurant here in Israel isn't Kosher https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/burger-king-returns-to-i...

Not if it has meat juice on it due to how its prepared. I realize some people are willing to be handwavey about it...

I have an interesting anecdote of possible relevance to this. A company that I worked for a few years ago was near a vegan burger joint. Their burgers were works of genius -- they were excellent and even meat-eaters like myself literally could not tell that there wasn't any meat in the things.

We hired a new dev who was a vegan from birth, and had never eaten food intended to taste like meat. In an effort to be inclusive, our manager took us to this restaurant for the welcome lunch, so that everyone would be able order freely.

The new hire gave it a try, but it turned out to be too much like the real thing, and he couldn't stomach eating more than a couple of bites of it.

That was what made me realize that fake vegetarian meats were not really intended for vegetarians. They are intended for current meat-eaters and meat-eaters who are trying to reduce or eliminate their meat consumption.

It's still vegetarian, just maybe not vegan.

I'm referring to the process of cooking it. They don't separate the food and you get cross-contact with meat and dairy proteins - making it non-vegetarian and definately not vegan. This is basically all marketing driven (which is fine) but its not animal-product free, which is what normal people think when they see "plant based" food.

I think that the Impossible Burger originally achieved its taste by using heme protein isolated from cow blood, but it looks like that's now done by expressing and purifying soy leghemoglobin in a yeast expression system, so I'm not sure what bifrost is referring to.

A Whopper contains mayonnaise, which is made from egg yolk. I assume that's what bifrost meant by "animal products".

Honestly I see no reason to eat this stuff ever unless I'm in a pinch. If I want a burger I'm not wanting something that looks or smells like meat just something with the same form factor as a burger.

Lately it's lentils and kidney beans with walnuts. Smash em all up and you got yourself a nice lil patty.

I make sliders this way with all the fixings and I just don't ever see myself wanting something more "realistic" haha