McDonald’s Experiment Selling McPlant Burgers in the US Fails Spectacularly
McPlant face-planted in San Fransisco test.
We have been covering the Globalist War on Meat for a while at Legal Insurrection. The latest battle has produced a victory for Team Beef.
The iconic hamburger chain McDonald’s thought it might try to appease the anti-meat forces by experimenting with McPlant. The result was a spectacular failure.
McDonald’s declared that its experiment with plant-based burgers was a disaster.
Joe Erlinger, who heads US operations for the Chicago-based fast food giant, told a business conference that the company discontinued the pilot program after customers in San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth panned the McPlant.
The McPlant “was not successful in either market,” Erlinger told the Wall Street Journal’s Global Fast Food Forum in Chicago on Wednesday.
“I don’t think the US consumer is coming to McDonald’s or looking for McPlant or other plant-based proteins from McDonald’s now.”
The McPlant was test-marketed in San Francisco. If a plant-based burger can’t succeed in this super-woke city, it is doomed.
Speaking at the WSJ Global Food Forum, Erlinger said he had “asked the team to test the McPlant in two very different markets, and they chose San Francisco and Dallas.”
McDonald’s kicked off testing of the plant-based burger in the two cities in February 2022 and concluded it after a limited time. It involved about 600 restaurants in total.
“It was not successful in either market,” the McDonald’s USA president said at the forum. “So, I don’t think the U.S. consumer is coming to McDonald’s or looking for a McPlant or other plant-based proteins from McDonald’s now.”
McPlant does better in Europe. However, in this country, Americans don’t go to McDonald’s to eat plants.
Berlinger mentioned that the McPlant thrived in European markets, so much so that the chain even introduced a Double McPlant in the UK and Ireland. The plant-based burger was so popular in the Netherlands that McDonald’s added four new vegan products, including a McPlant variant, just last year. But while the McPlant manages to be beloved across the pond, it just wasn’t making a splash back at home.
“I don’t think the U.S. consumer is coming to McDonald’s or looking for McPlant or other plant-based proteins from McDonald’s now,” Erlinger said at the conference. He also added that the company won’t be reintroducing salads to the menu, since customers aren’t showing a demand for the product either.
While McDonald’s appears to be struggling with the vegetarian market, other fast food chains like Burger King and Taco Bell have seen varied degrees of success with their own plant-based menu items.
McDonald’s has been given a valuable reminder about America.
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) July 1, 2024
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Comments
Morningstar burgers are good but they’re not thought of as meat, just as the variety that they are. They’re so easy to microwave and eat that they’re not something you’d think of going out for. Like you wouldn’t go out for toast either. (Old Bob and Ray joke, the House of Toast.)
Boca brand tends to be more mystery food, like institutional gray meat. Not the brand to try first.
McDonald’s would be better off with a patty that is clearly not meant to fool the eater into believing it is meat. A vegetable patty with its own unique flavor profile, along with a mix of toppings that work well with it, would be more successful.
Perhaps a small step back from Soylent Green.
For now.
The McDonner
My grandparents were Seventh-day Adventist and vegetarians, my grandmother produced very tasty meals, both lived far past the norm.
I still did not give up meat 🙂
I get morning star when we are having a cook out and I have vegetarian friends over ..
coming soon from WEF
bug burgers …
In the vegan household this carnivore lives in, we have Beyond and Impossible. They are both delicious. I consider them to be chemistry experiments.
McPlant is a horrible branding mistake. No wonder it failed.
I have to admit, the Impossible Whopper tasted the same to me as a regular Whopper.
It’s too bad Subway’s veggie patties now taste like pulped cardboard with veggie bits inside. They used to be delicious.
Told the wife the same thing. The Morningstar product is quite tasty but is not a burger so don’t think of it like that. It is just something else on the menu.
Strange that people don’t go to a hamburger place for an actual hamburger considering the price of a fast food meal now.
Yeah. I had their black bean burgers and thought they were pretty good. But the burger wasn’t trying to be what it wasn’t… meat.
Items in today’s news:
1. McDonald’s fails trying to sell a plant for a burger
2. Democrats fail trying to sell a plant for a president
Europeans are idiots.
I’d like to point out that this is the entire point of running a pilot program, to find out if something works in an iterative process. I could have told you it would fail just as I could have predicted that the rogue franchisee that took it upon himself to start using beef tallow to cook his French fries would cause a horrible traffic jam outside his restaurant.
You have to give them credit for trying something but doing so in a way that contains the cost of failure.
While I’m on the subject of McD’s, I pulled into that rest area on I-95 in Connecticut that was the subject of those news stories about overpriced fast food meals. I had been driving for hours and was hungry. I gotta tell ya, that burger was *excellent* by any standard. I was, quite frankly, shocked. And the milkshake machine was working too!
Were they selling it at meat prices?
To be fair: some plant-based foods can be pretty good (and I don’t mean just salads and other vegetables). The Tattooed Chef used to have a cauliflower pizza bowl that I liked very much, but I think the company stopped making them.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a vegetarian or a vegan, but some of those kinds of foods I like very much.
Indeed. If it’s so good that you don’t even notice it’s meatless? it’s a win all around.
I have only recently discovered Indian cuisine (it was never accessible anywhere I ever lived) which you can order with meat or with paneer, a cheese with a consistency not unlike chicken. It’s delightful, and I don’t miss the meat at all.
Next up for test marketing- the McCicida
Maybe because they cost $20 in SF because newsom min wage hike. McDonalds not renewing leases in CA.
In a couple of locations mainly near malls. All McDonalds are not closing down.
Reminds me of tofu n tofurkey — a food so good it has to pretend to be something else to get you to eat it.
Family story:
DW’s dad owned a multi-generational hardware store, and so would regularly frequent trade shows to look for new items to stock. At one, one of the booths was a fellow exhibiting (then-new) “turkey ham.” My FIL said, “Two meat sausage?” “No,” said the hawker, “it’s turkey that’s been specially processed to taste just like ham..” FIL was befuddled. “Why would anybody go to the trouble to do that when you could just buy ham?” The hawker bristled mildly: “Some people can’t EAT ham.”
— Oh!!
I remember eating turkey ham sammiches in my twenties when I was poor and struggling. It was half the cost of ham ham and wasn’t bad.
And now I got a flashback to Hamtaro… HAM HAM!
“I don’t think the US consumer is coming to McDonald’s or looking for McPlant or other plant-based proteins from McDonald’s now.”
Really!?! I am just Shocked! Shocked I tell you!
I think the best thing I have heard about Plant based “proteins” is; “If plant based foods are so good, then why do they try so hard to make them look like non-plant based foods?”
Haven’t seen an answer yet.
Love your AI image, Leslie! Particularly the TWO Statues of Liberty, and the kid firing an AR-15 with both of his right hands!
Q. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
A. Well, I have had a double McPlant.
McDonalds will now replace the mcplant with the
they issued a statement :
the mcplant failed b/c of a right wing conspiracy that plants are what the fbi used to disrupt the trump admin
Next time you are in the supermarket, check out the amount of salt that is in that plant based crap. Stuff will kill ‘ya.