A Vegan Sued Burger King over Its ‘Impossible Whopper’
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
And I'm also going to say: If Burger King is forced to get a separate stove(or whatever it's called in the industrial-sized context they're in) just for that 1 burger, they will cancel that burger.
That's my prediction. Because it's too much of an up-front cost.
I'm very glad that this burger has entered the chain and is getting both the vegan/vegetarian community, as well as regular meat-eating people, like myself, in on it.
If people who eat meat start choosing this over a regular burger, it's a win. If this drives previously non-existing traffic to burger king, all of which uses this one product, it's a win.
This is about changing the industry at large. About creating big orders and showing the industry that this is worth investing in. And eventually: normalizing it.
We can solve the problem of the not-yet-vaporized grease particles later.
I'm not saying we should ignore it. I'm saying it's not a current priority. But it will be later.
I've tried the burger, and I liked it, I'll definitely pick it again.
They will not kill it, it's too popular to make that decision, and has gigantic growth potential. From business perspective they will do everything to keep those few milion vegans getting into BK.
For me biggest problem is meat smell inside of their restaurants. Most vegans don't like that. ;)
It's popular enough to double the square footage devoted to grills (at, generally, a hefty monthly lease cost per square foot), double the energy consumption, and double the employee time for grill cleaning and maintenance?
I'm skeptical.
Why would they need the vegan grills to be the same size as the meat grills, unless they’re selling the same number of them? And if they are, doing so seems a no-brainer.
It seems more likely that they'd just have to tweak the way it's advertised, with some fine print making it clear that it's cooked on the same grill as meat products (as with "processed on equipment that also processes nuts" type disclaimers).
A problem is ultra-orthodoxy along with less than truthful advertising. As someone commented in line, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I know in other cultures I've worked in abroad this would not be a problem. People presume best effort with these kinds of things and don't take it literally --some people might but they'd be a tiny tiny minority. It was usually the foreigner who got upset that something wasn't 100% vegan even if in spirit things were and locals were okay with it.
I'm not a fan of regulation obstructing experimentation, but in this case, I think requiring proper cooking process for something that is purportedly vegetarian is absolutely necessary.
I don't see the problem with fine-print like "may have touched real meat". The impossible whopper should be marketed towards omnivores who:
1. Understand the personal/environmental problems with eating meat.
2. Are interested in alternatives.
I understand why some vegans are put off by the idea of eating something cooked on the same grill as actual meat but I think we need pragmatism more than anything right now.
I genuinely have never met a vegan who would be bothered by this, and I know quite a few. If there were still bits of meat on the grill it could still be kind of gross if they came off on the burger I guess, but most would have no problem with it. This strikes me as an extremely rare case, and I don't see any obvious grounds for a lawsuit.
But like I said I think getting some meat alternatives in front of the general public is important enough that I'll live with it.
I think the Impossible Whopper will stick around, but the sacrosanct vegan preparation was just a promotional gimmick to stimulate sales, with no intention of adherence to strict practices. My suspicion was always that the vegan options would be promoted for the initial release, but then it would be quietly walked back to typical preparation steps after the hype died down, and the rate of sandwich sales peaked and leveled off.
With that, you get shift managers of individual locations, hamfistedly claiming whatever they think passes for customer service, whether that be keeping the customer lines and drive through windows moving at a brisk pace during lunch and evening rushes, or bending over backwards for the squeakiest wheels in search of grease.
Meanwhile, dog meat analogies aside, the cult of the complainiest customers will only win so many victories. The patty might be vegan, and the last mile falls upon the 16 year-old kid behind the counter. Disgust, revulsion, and so on, at the thought of giving any money to a meat selling business that moves titanic quantities of animal carcass should give a vegan pause, before even stepping through the front door, if they're that serious about their belief system.
It's fine to level the argument that the tiniest drop of raw sewage is unacceptable in any glass of water, but the reality is that the consumer's physiological fragility remains unharmed and unthreatened in a scenario such as this. The comingled vegan and animal byproducts are a reality, evident by virtue of the very nature establishment itself.
You get what you pay for. It's fast food. They won't stop selling the burger, but they might annotate Vegan* with an asterisk.
* at participating locationsSurely anyone who thinks meat is that bad would never step foot in a restaurant that cooks meat in the first place, regardless of grills?
I am quite bothered by it, to the (IMO reasonable) point of not eating what I'm served and not coming back if I suspect that's the case.
I'm not personally bothered by using the same tools to handle both meat and vegan options, as long as I can't taste it, if we're talking about backyard barbecuing with friends. But I expect more from a company.
I had an unpleasant experience a couple of years ago at Subway. I ordered a vegan sub, and the person behind the counter asked if I wanted them to switch their plastic gloves. "No need," I said, because I thought it was a moral question. But when I started eating the sub I could smell meat along the whole bread as I ate it. It was not pleasant when it was two decades since I last had meat, but I was drunk and hungry and finished it anyway.
Isn't the whole point of this burger to taste like real meat ?
Why? What’s the emergency? BK raising their profits? They laughed at us not so long ago now they just realize there’s an opportunity here, i’d rather support local vegan eateries. It was as simple as putting a disclaimer in the ad “vegan burgers are cooked on shared equipment and can contain traces of meat”.
I agree with Burger King is doing it for profit, but that's the point of capitalism: we if want change, we vote with our dollar. I have no huge love for impossible burger. It's too much like the real thing now that I'm years out from eating beef; however, I'm going to be buy some now and then because I want to see the product being sold.
It's a Burger King for god's sake - what do you expect? If you want the mainstream to embrace your values you don't want to damage the chances of increasing acceptance just because the ad copy wasn't a 100% accurate.
Would you say "Oh, it's fine!" to someone religious who doesn't eat beef or pork but consumes trace amounts despite a sign saying Halal/Kosher Patties? (As mentioned in the article)
Consider if instead they were allergic -- would they accept something with trace amounts of their allergen?
Restaurants, fast food or otherwise, have an obligation to handle food in a safe manner.
Misleading customers with false advertising is wrong, and potentially dangerous. (I'm told some vegans develop an intolerance for meat over time)
Personally, I'm with you that using the same grill is too much contamination, but it's a fine line. The only way to be sure is to have separate restaurants, which is what they do in Israel to keep kosher. They serve meat or cheese, not both, in any given restaurant.
I'm not vegan, or vegetarian, and am probably pretty guilty of "marginalizing vegan choices" in general. I eat a lot of meat and don't intend to stop, and enjoy making fun of "rabbit food" and those who voluntarily subsist on it.
To me, it seems pretty terrible for BK to advertise something which we all know of as "vegan food", and then not have it be vegan. This may sound melodramatic, but to my mind, tricking someone with some dietary restriction (kosher/halal, say) into violating it (by sneaking pork into a dish) is a sort of physical assault. That's pretty much what BK, presumably unwittingly, did here. They should suffer financially for that.
as someone who has had to be confined to celiac and vegan diets for health reasons, I think it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would assume that any single ingredient in a meal that can be vegan, produces a vegan meal.
If we were to use the criteria of 'food that's known as X but isn't' as a way to judge whether or not we should sue restaurants, celiacs would be having a field day. Celiac-neutral ingredients are used throughout the food industry in ways that will harm celiac patients that are too ignorant to inquire about preparation and contamination.
I guess having been a part of that struggle made me realize that a) food preparation, as an industry, is exceedingly vague both about what you're receiving and how it was prepared, and b) that my food consumption is no one elses business, and that to make informed decisions about it requires personal legwork and investigation -- folks who want the industry to do it for them are going to have a real hard time of things.
I'm a idiot who should have read TFA before commenting --- because then I'd have been able to make a slightly stronger case. The burger was advertised as "0% beef". Now that, coupled with the "everybody knows the impossible burger is vegan", screams to me that it's a vegetarian meal.
The task of eating shouldn't be a hellish chore for people with reasonably common dietary restrictions. I don't know much about celiac disease, but my understanding is that a large part of it is "gluten = bad". If I see something advertised as "0% gluten", it should be safe to assume that it's celiac-safe!
Even disregarding the "0%" part, though... the news has been trumpeting the "impossible burger" for months now. Suppose there had been some "impossible bread" in the news, because it was specially invented to avoid needing gluten. Then, ordering an "impossible burger on impossible bread" from BK, I'd expect it to be gluten-free! Not because it happens to be made with a single gluten-free ingredient, but because the form of the advertising, in the context of the last year of news, would lead any reasonable person to the conclusion that yes, this burger was made with the intention to be gluten-free and vegetarian.
You're absolutely right that, if you have celiac disease, or strong moral dietary restrictions, and you take the attitude of "BK better get it right", then you're gonna have a bad time. But, to me, that's clearly wrong, and we should seek to change it.
Gluten-sensitive folks (Celiacs especially) don't trust anything that isn't shrinkwrapped in a sturdy package. It doesn't matter what the menu says, because life gets veeery messy compared to picking stuff up from supermarket shelves.
Plus, 0% is not 0.0000000%, it's one significant digit. Sure, on the other hand it should have been "0 + epsilon % beef", but ... there's probably some beef in the air too in burger fast food joints / restaurants.
And so it might be that "vegan" means "no animals harmed during the making of this nor does the sale of this contribute to that", so you can eat animal meat after the animal naturally died and it's not in a factory, ugly farm setting.
Or it might mean that no meat or animal products added/used, except reasonable contamination. After all in lactose-free milk there's still some 0.09% lactose, etc.
Or whatever.
For example frying oil has a big impact on taste, so that might be important, because if it's contamination easily detected by humans then it means it should be contamination easily prevented.
Grills/stovetops? I have no idea, probably not much.
“””
The Certified Vegan Logo is a registered trademark, similar in nature to the kosher mark, for products that do not contain animal products or byproducts and that have not been tested on animals. The certified logo is easily visible to consumers interested in vegan products and helps vegans to shop without constantly consulting ingredient lists. It also helps companies recognize a growing vegan market, as well as bringing the word Vegan—and the lifestyle it represents—into the mainstream. (Please keep in mind, however, that the logo is not yet on every vegan product.) The Certified Vegan Logo is currently on thousands of products manufactured by over 1000 companies.
“””
I think people want it to be vegan. That doesn't make it so.
You say "do the legwork", but this isn't possible if companies are allowed to outright lie to you. Sure we keep a list of "known lies" like the mushroom D3 advertised as vegan that is just non-vegan D3 fed to mushrooms. But such deception should not be allowed or it will get much worse as the number of vegans increases. IMO, anyone who wants to ever be able to select products based on anything but a few common criteria should support a hard line on complete ingredient lists and accuracy in advertising.
For health reasons, like gluten, a perfect separation makes sense. But as long as people know this is what’s up, I think it’s okay. (And, specifically, they are not ridiculous for reusing it he same steel)
I think we're actually saying the same thing.
Do you encounter this sort of thing outside of the internet? I've certainly seen online trolls mock vegans, etc but I haven't witnessed it IRL.
At work for example, we always make sure we go to places which accomodate those on Vegan diets.
> If you want the mainstream to embrace your values you don't want to damage the chances of increasing acceptance
Is this what Vegans want though? For the Vegans I know, they don't try to get us to embrace vegan values, they simply stick to their diets quietly.
If I decided that I only wanted to eat blue M&Ms and took offense at getting a packet with them mixed with the other colours (sorry, cross contaminated), it would be unreasonable to expect the manufacturer to make blue only packs to suit me, or to expect shops to start stocking them.
I disagree with this. A steakhouse is expected to serve steak, a Korean BBQ, korean bbq, and a those juice bars are expected to serve fruit smoothies etc.
I follow the keto diet, and we need to make sure any places we go have options for me too (a lot don't). That doesn't mean I'm marginalized though.
The thing I do have a problem with (on behalf of vegans, even though I'm not one) is when a restaurant says they have "Vegan options" or are "Vegan Friendly", and then it's just a disgusting garden salad.
I'm a vegan. I've been invited to eat at steak houses in work related setting. And people know about these limits. And I'm not alone in that camp here.
Though I will get opinionated if they microwave fish or shellfish in the microwave that’s less than 10 feet from my head! That’s a shared space thing though and they have multiple microwave options. They’re just lazy.
If you have to also purchase separate capital equipment to cook the food, then it will kill the product. (Microwaves have residue just like stove tops).
You can do this by making Vegans look bad.
Making sure this case is publicised as much as possible will help that. Burger King can adapt. Making the burger look lame is the objective.
For me, it's both. For others, it's religious. For far fewer, it's health (allergies, intolerances, etc). In all of those cases, if a restaurant advertises their product as meat free, it should be or else it's false advertising.
Further complicating the issue is that burger king has for years sold a veggie patty that is heated in the microwave - using separate tools and is "contamination free".
So anyways, if they want to advertise meat-free, then it should be a meat-free product that is served to you.
Some of those include discomfort with eating animals and their byproducts, as you mention -- for others, it's based on a desire to encourage more sustainable environmentally-friendly food options.
For some subset of the spectrum mentioned, cross-contamination is an important issue - and for the rest, it may be acceptable under some circumstances, but there's no downside to removal of contamination, so they'd likely support it given the choice.
There may be a downside, if the cost of compliance is too high and the business decides to stop offering the product.
If they'd used their own cutlery there would not have anywhere near as much animosity.
I see this sort of behavior as irrational. But I dont live these peoples lives and dont believe what they believe.
I just liked their food :-P
ie, could never be cleaned enough to be "vegan" again...
bloody bonkers really.
Edit, yes it was metal...
I find it hard to believe that such a person would willingly go inside a Burger King in the first place.
I mean, every surface in one of those places is eventually coated with a layer of grease, right?
They cant claim Vegan if there is animal product in and on it.
Then there's really no such thing as "vegan". All fruits, vegetables, grains, flours...have a certain number of insects in or on them (especially if they're organic).
It would be possible to have some definition like the one for Kosher rules (fundamentally, less than 1 part in 60 doesn't count, though there are many nuances on top of that), but 100% absence of animal products is simply not possible.
You may well fid it hard to be believe, but vegans actually have meat eating friends and may be accepting of other people's dietary choices, and may want to socialise with them - without putting meat products in their mouths.
Wouldn't vegetarians, religious folks, and alpha-gal syndrome sufferers also want a zero animal-product burger? The market is pretty diverse for this demand.
I did address alpha-gal by saying that those who have allergies should be mindful of cross contamination in restaurants that serve the stuff they are allergic to.
This "impossible burger" isn't the result of vegans picketing BK HQ - it's a marketing ploy by BK... how are vegans being painted as the bad guys here?
It's not just offering the product it's requiring a separate process for it that costs money to each franchisee
The impossible burger is a product. The demands are the result of these people not impossible burger
This is a problem between BK management and the franchises. You can't blame the consumer for expecting to receive the product as advertised. If it's too complicated to produce, don't offer it.
You can put 0 grams fat per serving on a product that actually has 0.01 grams of fat.
If a vegan restaurant advertises 0% animal products I guarantee that is also incorrect. There is some small percentage of insect parts in almost everything.
Obviously there is some margin.
Clearly there is some threshold. What is it? 1 part per thousand? 1 part per billion?
In one case, the result is occasional accidental contamination, in the other, the product is intentionally placed on a contaminated surface.
I don't think anyone is expecting perfection, but there is no reasonable effort being made to avoid this problem for a product that BK advertises as "0% beef".
Adding an extra grill to the restaurant isn't reasonable. Apparently they will microwave it if you ask.
However, the entire kitchen is covered in grease, it's a burger king. There's going to be some amount of cross contamination no matter what they do. They may be able to reduce it from 0.01% beef to 0.001% beef, but who cares? Who is ok with 1 part in 100,000, but not 1 part in 10,000?
There's no functional difference unless you have an allergy and that happens to be the threshold.
If you aren't OK with eating something to that touched meat and may contain trace amounts of beef, don't eat at a Burger restaurant.
The downside here is that maybe it stops vegan products from getting more popular and becoming more readily available. That's my only concern. I'm otherwise not opposed to suing companies for false advertising, and I wish that happened more often because if it did, this problem wouldn't have come up in the first place.
Although I can see the ridiculous side to this. If I were a hardcore vegan I wouldn't be trusting BK to do the right thing. On my occasional shameful forays to BK I'm looking for a very specific combo - salt, animal protein, empty carbs and a sugar hit. If I'm looking for a healthy choice BK doesn't even cross my mind.
BK chose this product and marketing specifically to cater to a special interest group with dietary restrictions. No one is demanding that BK must serve vegan food other than by usual consumer pressure.
The problem is that BK really doesn't give one iota of damn about the strict vegans. They're not coming to BK no matter what as only an idiot would believe that there exists any surface in a BK that isn't contaminated with meat. What BK cares about are the "sorta-vegan" folks who happen to be tagging along when the whole group hits BK. However, "Vegan enough that you can be a poseur and rationalize it" doesn't have the same ad copy quality.
However, bringing this back to specifics, someone who is halal should not be able to complain about going into a BBQ joint. However, if said BBQ joint claims to be halal, then it better comply. And if a someone halal decides to sue for your restaurant not being compliant, they deserve to win.
(And, what you forget, is that a lot of the "anti-pork" proscriptions came about as a way to avoid trichinosis. So, if it weren't for modern meat handling, this would be a health issue as well as a religious one.)
In 2002, the company already had a response for this situation. "'The Burger King VeggieBurger is not positioned to be a vegetarian or vegan burger. It was designed to be a meatless alternative.' These were the words VIP heard when we called Burger King headquarters in Miami, Florida."
2005: "The VIP tasters sampled the original BK Veggie Burger that was warmed slightly in the microwave to avoid contamination by the animal products cooked on the grill."
2002: "Vegetarians who order the BK VEGGIE should specify that they want it cooked away from the Whoppers. To make certain, they should request it be microwaved."
This is very common for traces of nuts and fish. I imagine all vegetarians have this routine for products they haven't bought before. Some vegans/vegetarians care about it a lot, some don't. Both are acceptable stances in my opinion. It's all about transparency.
We also all know insects were likely crushed while harvesting plants and cereals we eat, and probably ended up in our food. But you do develop a certain disgust at the idea that a dead mammal/bird/fish was processed along with your food, so it makes the food less enjoyable. In this case, you would likely simply not go to Burger King, just like you wouldn't buy the pre-processed food that has traces amount of whatever you don't want to sponsor.
No idea if it was there a few days ago. No idea if it exists on the menu in stores.
“ *For guests looking for a meat-free option, a non-broiler method of preparation is available upon request.. ”
So looks like that’s their answer.
I hope this fella loses.