The biggest food trend for 2020 is undoubtedly going to be plant-based meat in restaurants. Burger King has already rolled out their version of the vegan Whopper, and after months of hype on every media imaginable, the Impossible Whopper is now a profitable staple in their stores across the United States. White Castle recently came out with Impossible Sliders. KFC now offers something called Beyond the Fried Chicken. It would be hard to throw a stone in a food court without hitting some kind of plant-based meat product.
All except at McDonald’s. They are the last of the carnivore holdouts. They’re not making a big deal out of their refusal to offer plant-based meat on their menus, they’re just not very excited about it yet. The fact is they have experimented with some plant-based hamburger patties in, of all places, Finland — but the company is keeping mum about the results. Fast food industry experts say that one reason McDonald’s is not trying to attract any attention about their no-vegan-here-folks policy is to avoid any protests and confrontations, such as those that disrupted their business model in India, France, and the Philippines in the past several years. It is also posited that with a huge share of the fast food market, there is not a plant-based meat company as yet ready to service the massive kind of orders McDonald’s would place if they went into plant-based meat whole hog (pardon the pun!)