Veggie Burger Nation

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This fall, McDonald’s, the world’s biggest purveyor of beef burgers, put what might be the antithesis of its famous Quarter Pounder on the menu: the McVeggie.

Unlike the Beyond and Impossible plant-based burgers fast-food chains began selling in 2018, the McVeggie is not trying to look, smell or taste like beef. Its fried patty is a breadcrumb-coated mash of zucchini, peas, carrots, green beans, broccoli, corn and edamame.

Within days of its test launch this spring, it was selling out at locations across Canada. Immediately, content creators posted their reviews and endorsements on social media.

To many Canadians, the McVeggie might be reminiscent of plant-based burgers made at hippie cafés near university campuses or sold in frozen pucks at health food co-ops. But for those who have dined at McDonald’s in India, home to the world’s largest vegetarian population, it’s a close copy of the identically named sandwich that’s been on the menu there since 2012 as part of a large suite of meat-free options. On YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, reviewers from the South Asian diaspora gushed that there was finally something at McDonald’s for them, describing the McVeggie as a nostalgic taste of home.

McDonald’s, A&W and a growing number of smaller chains in Canada have recently made a sharp pivot to vegetarian offerings crafted in part to lure a key demographic: the more than 900,000 Indians who have been granted Canadian permanent residency since 2015. Experts say it’s symbolic of a shift under way in Canada: a reconsideration of what vegetarian food can be, and a challenge to the Western hierarchy of protein that has long placed meat at the top.

The faux-meat flop

It wasn’t even a decade ago that meat analogues were heralded as the future of sustainable food. Their sky-high valuations prompted nearly every fast-food chain to put a faux-meat sandwich on its menu by 2020: A&W’s Beyond Meat Burger, Wendy’s Plantiful Burger, Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, Harvey’s Lightlife Burger, Tim Hortons’s breakfast sandwiches, first made with patties from Beyond Meat and then with Impossible Foods. But most were a flop, and have since been pulled from menus.

Consumers – mainly meat-eaters – were often curious enough to try these plant-based burgers but rarely became repeat customers, according to Texas A&M University researcher Lingxiao Wang. In a study published in 2024, Wang and her colleagues tracked purchases of Impossible Burgers at supermarkets and found that 70 per cent of households that bought them once never purchased them again. Fake meat could come close to tasting like the real thing, but when actual beef was available, customers seemed to prefer it, Wang says.

McDonald’s Canada developed a faux-meat burger called the PLT, using Beyond Meat, that tested so poorly in a 2020 trial run that the company ditched plans for a national rollout. Years later, it went back to the drawing board and came up with the McVeggie.

“Customers were really more excited about a veggie-forward burger than a meat replica,” says Francesca Cardarelli, McDonald’s Canada’s chief marketing officer.

The growing movement toward a “back to the basics” style of eating has made consumers wary of ultra-processed foods – an effort supported by the beef industry. Last month, European Parliament voted to ban the use of words such as burger to describe faux-meat products after a successful lobbying effort by livestock farmers.

A&W Canada is one of the few chains that has kept their faux-meat burger on its menu (though they’ve ended their deal with Beyond Meat and now make the patty themselves), but that sandwich’s prime target had always been the flexitarian (someone who mostly ate a plant-based diet but on rare occasions would eat meat).

The meat-like characteristics that made the burger appealing to those who enjoyed animal protein made it unappealing to South Asian customers who never ate beef, says Karan Suri, A&W’s senior director of innovation. They’ve kept the faux-meat burger on the menu, but he knew they needed to expand their offerings.

Suri, who has worked as a chef in luxury hotels in India, Singapore, the U.A.E. and Vancouver, knew that this cohort of customers wanted a vegetarian product that was vegetable-forward and set to work in the company’s innovation kitchen to develop what became known as the Masala Veggie Burger.

The patty, similar to McDonald’s, has a fried coating and is filled with visible chunks of red and yellow pepper, spinach and carrot.

“We did not want this burger to be feeling like it came from a different planet,” Suri said.

He wanted the patty to have a significant amount of protein in it and be as filling as a beef burger. He reached out to Nanak Foods, the Surrey, B.C.-based dairy producer best known for its paneer (a soft, non-melting Indian cheese), with a pitch to collaborate.

When developing the patty’s crispy breadcrumb coating, Suri said it was important to avoid eggs. His team developed a vegan masala aioli (filled with familiar warming spices such as cumin and red chili) in place of mayonnaise – which contains eggs – since many South Asians are lacto-vegetarians and don’t consume them.

He insisted the fresh onions that topped the burger needed to be red – as they typically are when served raw in India – not yellow or white.

There was a lot of internal debate about the name – whether they should simply call it a “veggie burger” – and Suri insisted its Indian influence needed to be front and centre.

“We’re not shying back on anything. This is a masala. This is a South Asian-inspired burger,” he said. (For those looking for something milder, the same burger – with a mayo-based sauce replacing the spicy eggless one – is sold as the “Crispy Veggie Burger.”)

In the first test run in selected Ontario restaurants, which was supposed to last five weeks, the burger sold out in 10 days. It was then rolled out nationally last fall as a limited-time offer and this year was permanently added to the menu. It was joined by the Spicy Piri Piri Potato Buddy – a hash brown in a bun served with red onion, lettuce, tomato and a spicy sauce – a budget-friendly sandwich inspired by Indian street foods such as aloo tikki and vada pav, a popular menu hack South Asian staff had been doing for years, says Suri.

With the Masala Veggie and McVeggie, A&W and McDonald’s are playing catch-up to the hundreds of Indian-run eateries across Canada that have long sold their own desi-inspired veggie burgers. At the six locations of B.C.-based chain Indian Burger Joint, the entire sandwich menu (which includes a Mumbai Masala Sandwich and Pav Bhaji Sandwich) is vegetarian or vegan. At the Toronto, Brampton and Calgary locations of the chain Sector 17, named after the famous market in Chandigarh, India, there’s a Bombay Burger, a Signature Veg Burger and an Aloo Tikki Noodle Burger on the menu – all of which are meat-free.

Nicola Mooney, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of the Fraser Valley who teaches courses on food and diaspora, says the surge in Indian migration to Canada in the past decade has broadened the idea of what vegetarian food can be.

“As a cuisine, there’s a much more extensive and vibrant palate that South Asians have,” she says. “Whereas if you look at the kind of traditional Euro-American one, it’s meat and potatoes. That’s what the burger and fries meal is.”

McDonald’s realized they were losing customers by not having a plant-based sandwich on their menu: When deciding where to go out for a meal, vegetarians and vegans were influencing their meat-eating social circle not to choose McDonald’s because there were no options for them, explains Cardarelli, the company’s chief marketing officer. They were exercising what the industry calls the “veto vote.”

“They’re in the business to do well,” says Kathleen Kevany, an agriculture professor at Dalhousie University who studies sustainable food systems.

“Some people are identifying with being more plant-rich, they want more cultural diversity, they want less inauthentic food,” she said. “I think this was a switch to be far more aware of the changing demographics.”