It was also the birthplace of industrial meat, where fateful new methods permanently changed how beef, pork and poultry were produced and transported, and evolved into what is now called factory farming. Namely, refrigerated train cars enabled a nationwide supply network, and production (once local and small-scale) was highly centralized by the biggest four meatpacking companies. A surge in output relied on the abundance of a cheap, desperate and largely immigrant workforce that included children. Production lines had been effectively de-skilled through division of labour (the “disassembly line”), and workers lived in unsanitary, crowded slums on the outskirts of the stockyards. 

In 1904, the young socialist Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago’s stockyards making notes on the squalid working and living conditions. The result was The Jungle, a novel about a Lithuanian immigrant’s journey through Chicago meatpacking. The Jungle made it to the desk of President Theodore Roosevelt, who used its stomach-turning descriptions of unsanitary meat being shipped out to Americans to push food-safety legislation. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, thus beginning the era of federal food inspection. 

Roosevelt’s bills overlooked Sinclair’s primary aim, however, which was to improve the lives of workers. Eventually, after decades of organizing, unions grew stronger, and the dream of The Jungle looked more like reality. Between 1960 and 1980, meatpacking wages ranged from 15% to 19% higher than average manufacturing wages. The “big four” controlled only 20% of the meat market. But the 1980s saw the beginning of a gradual backslide, with production moving from urban centres to union-weak rural areas, line speeds increasing and wages falling. From 1952 to 2020, the percentage of workers covered by union contracts went from about 90% to 18%. Today, the new big four command more than 80% of the market.

Now almost 120 years after The Jungle was published, industrial meat has yet to find the balance between profit and worker well-being. 

The most dangerous industry

In the early hours of the morning shift at a Virginia poultry factory in February 2022, a 14-year-old Guatemalan boy had been cleaning a machine that suddenly turned on and pulled him by his shirt sleeve along a conveyor. His forearm was then torn open down to the bone by plastic machine teeth. He survived the incident, undergoing several surgeries and months of physical therapy. Then in July, a 16-year-old worker was killed after being pulled into a machine at a Mar-Jac Poultry plant in Mississippi. The teens were among thousands of migrant youth illegally working dangerous jobs in the United States, many for sanitation companies where they would clean dangerous equipment like bone saws and head splitters. At the Virginia plant, minors were falsifying papers to get hired by Fayette Janitorial, the cleaning company contracted by Perdue Farms, then working overnight and attending school during the day, exhausted. 

The U.S. Department of Labor announced an investigation into Perdue and Tyson Foods, two of the country’s largest poultry producers, and in February of this year asked a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order against Fayette while it investigated the company’s labour practices. This followed Labor Department penalties last February of US$1.5 million against Packers Sanitation Services, which was found to employ more than 100 children illegally in eight states, including at plants owned by JBS, the world’s largest meat company.

The New York Times called the situation “a new economy of exploitation,” but it’s only the latest chapter in the meat industry’s history of worker hazards.

For the last two decades, groups like Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have been sounding the alarm about high injury rates, insufficient regulations, suppression of collective bargaining rights, and the growing reliance on vulnerable migrant and undocumented workers largely powerless to demand better conditions. High line speeds are cited by workers as the main source of danger, causing them to cut themselves or develop musculoskeletal disorders. Gail Eisnitz, author of Slaughterhouse, reported Bureau of Labor Statistics showing “nearly thirty-six injuries or illnesses for every hundred workers,” making meatpacking “the most dangerous industry in the United States.” Eisnitz called meatpacking workers “an army of walking wounded.” 

Horror stories occasionally spark public awareness of the meatpacking world, but the industry quickly returns to obscurity.

In April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the vulnerabilities of meat workers into clear relief, once again. Amid plant closures, looming meat shortages and rising infections and deaths, President Donald Trump signed an executive order using the Defense Production Act to compel meatpacking facilities to remain open. Following this, 15 large poultry plants received U.S. Department of Agriculture approval to increase line speeds from 140 to 175 birds per minute. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) received a spike in worker complaints. 

In June 2023, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report that found COVID-19 infection rates in meatpacking facilities up to 70 times higher than the general population due to the crowded nature of the workplaces.

Canada didn’t fare well, either. By May 2020, the single-largest COVID-19 outbreak site in North America was a Cargill meatpacking plant in High River, Alberta, where 950 cases had been recorded (out of 2,000 workers), and two deaths. The union representing the plant’s workers filed a complaint of unfair labour practice and requested a stop-work order, but the plant reopened after a brief closure, with a majority of workers reporting concern for their safety. A class action lawsuit against Cargill is ongoing.

Canadian meat workers also face the grinding pressures of speed and output. David Magina, a former inspector with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, says he inspected chicken carcasses at line speeds of three birds per second (280 per minute). Even with the benefits of being a federal employee, Magina felt the deleterious effects of the environment. “My life is more important than any amount of money,” he says. Magina developed severe asthma, contracted a pathogen and suffered frequent headaches. The line workers he became friendly with regularly reported carpal tunnel syndrome, shoulder pain and eye strain. 

Magina’s tenure in slaughterhouses also triggered what may be the most inadequately addressed hazard of working in the meat industry: post-traumatic stress disorder. “I saw unimaginable things. Standard industry practice is horrific, but I’ve seen even more extreme things.” People working the kill floor in particular become “shells of themselves,” Magina says. Studies have found that slaughterhouse workers experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and negative coping behaviour such as aggressiveness, substance abuse and domestic violence. The often vulnerable economic and cultural position of these workers means they cannot access sufficient mental health support – many lean on their communities for relief.

The industry keeps looking to temporary foreign workers (TFWs) to fill its labour shortages. In 2022, Employment and Social Development Canada announced a temporary increase on the cap of how many TFWs can work at a specific work location in certain sectors (including meatpacking), from 20% to 30% (after a previous limit of 10%). In 2020, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended its own TFW program by three years so that producers could retain workers whose visas were expiring. 

Some say we’re looking at the problem all wrong. Instead of putting economic migrants in dangerous jobs, should we be creating a labour market that uplifts precarious workers and doesn’t put them in harm’s way?

A way out 

“Nobody dreams of working in a slaughterhouse,” says Kendra Coulter, a University of Western Ontario professor who studies labour involving animals. Coulter says that while unions can increase wages and improve conditions marginally, “they will never fundamentally improve slaughterhouse work.” The focus, she says, needs to be on the creation of humane jobs that are good for people and good for animals. 

A recent report by the Stockholm Environment Institute suggests that a just transition for meat workers start with the Global North. Scaling down industrial meat could reduce environmental and health impacts, especially for communities exposed to the pollution associated with factory farms. However, the report cautions that a transition away from industrial meat will have “strong repercussions for communities where large numbers of people derive their livelihoods from meat supply chains.” While the plant-based sector could create more high-skilled jobs in certain regions, policy-makers will need to prioritize “the meaningful participation of marginalized groups,” groups that are often left behind in big industrial turnovers, like when auto and coal producers vacate regions. 

The UN Environment Programme and investor network Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) have also recently called for a just transition for meat workers. “Although no silver bullet exists for this sector” FAIRR says, “a just transition for food systems must be on the agenda for investors and policymakers alike.”

For workers seeking near-term relief, one possible answer might be more initiatives like Brave New Life Project, a volunteer-run non-profit that supports Colorado meat workers aiming to find new opportunities. Not an employment agency, Brave New Life is more of a holistic support network that assists with job-seeking and works with clients to find housing and food support, or obtain new job skills.

Although no silver bullet exists for this sector, a just transition for food systems must be on the agenda for investors and policymakers alike.

 

– Helena Wright and Stephanie Haszczyn, FAIRR

“One employment agent made a worker feel guilty about wanting to leave,” says co-founder Jessi Geist, referring to the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado. It’s just one of many barriers workers face when seeking a way out. “If immigrants have a low baseline of English, slaughterhouse work is all they can get,” Geist says. Other trade-offs like taking wage cuts for less stressful work, or upending their homes to relocate, are not always options for people supporting families. “Is my mental health more important than my family?” It’s a question workers often ask themselves, Geist says. 

Putting workers in better positions is key for Brave New Life. “Our long-term goal,” Geist says, “is to buy a piece of land, have people cultivate it, learn business skills, sell their products and become landowners themselves.” 

After an injury makes him unhirable in the stockyards, The Jungle’s central character finds work at a fertilizer plant. The fertilizer, it turns out, is toxic and deadly. Even today, it’s still not as simple as just getting out.

Christopher St. Prince is a Toronto-based journalist and fiction writer.

This story is part of our Spring 2024 Plant Power package. 

The post Is it time for a just transition in the meatpacking industry? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In February 2021, Robert Downey Jr. appeared on The Colbert Report to prove he’s a superhero out of the Iron Man suit too. In the segment, he plugged his green advocacy and venture capital initiative, FootPrint Coalition, which works with start-ups aiming to disrupt dirty industries. In a bit of show and tell, Colbert and Downey Jr. joked about two of FootPrint’s planet-saving ventures, bamboo and bugs. After stroking his cheek with sustainable bamboo toilet paper, Colbert held up a jar of brownish powder and quipped, “You’re not just getting me to eat dirt, are you?”

The powder was a mealworm larvae protein made by French start-up Ÿnsect, which to date has secured US$375 million in funding. According to FootPrint, mealworm larvae and other insect feeds present a big opportunity to clean up the notoriously polluting aquaculture industry. With global fish consumption doubling in the past 50 years, the company says that feeding fish insects, instead of the typical sardines, anchovies and soy, requires 98% less land and cuts overall resource use in half.

“We’re doing something incorrectly,” Downey Jr. told Colbert. “If we make this switch, it’s a huge, huge intervention.”

Beyond aquaculture, the environmental case for humans replacing vertebrate protein, especially greenhouse-gas-intensive beef, with lower-emitting insect protein is compelling. A seminal 2013 report from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) on eating insects highlighted the myriad benefits of edible insects, which include circular use of waste to rear insects, relatively low greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions, and low water use.

Given that agricultural, forestry and other land-use emissions account for 22% of global emissions, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development figures (nearly half of those are caused by livestock production), cutting food emissions while increasing food security is imperative. Combined with the nutritional case for insect protein (it’s packed with amino acids, fibre and micronutrients), and that it’s considered low risk for spreading zoonotic infections, deploying this supposed panacea seems like a cut-and-dried case to transform global food supplies.

But a potential blind spot hovers over the insect movement. Questions about insect sentience and welfare gather in the background, raising the spectre of a factory farming repeat, just on a miniature scale. Counterintuitive as it may seem to push pause on a potentially promising climate solution, the insect movement demands a deeper reflection on emission reductions that subjugate other life forms to mitigate a crisis caused by humans.

Swarms of investors

The business case for insect farming is strong, too. Conditions are ripe for growth, and investors are ponying up. Aside from venture-capital initiatives like Downey Jr.’s, government-backed insect mega-plants have been swarming agricultural news. In the last few years, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada awarded up to $8.5 million to a London, Ontario, cricket producer and $6 million to a facility in Alberta that breeds black soldier flies. In the U.K., a black-soldier-fly start-up won a £10-million grant from a government industrial-strategy fund to construct a facility outside London, while Ÿnsect snagged €20 million from the European Commission to build a vertical farm in northern France that would increase its production by 50 times. Earlier this year, a Spanish mealworm producer announced that it’s poised to break ground on a new facility that is reported to be the world’s largest at 90,000 square metres.

These facilities primarily produce animal feed and pet food, which is where most industrial insect production goes (for now). Even still, the output figures are staggering for an industry that remains somewhat marginal. A 2020 report from the research group Rethink Priorities estimated that upwards of 1.2 trillion insects are produced annually for feed and food (the majority being black soldier flies, crickets and mealworms), figures that would skyrocket with the mainstreaming of entomophagy – that is, humans eating insects.

Roughly two billion people worldwide already eat insects regularly (largely in Asia, Africa and Latin America). Most of this, however, is locally caught, harvested and consumed as an affordable, traditional source of protein and, often, a means of survival. On North American grocery shelves, they’re being branded as a novelty “superfood”: crickets are turning up in products like protein bars, chips, cookies and whole protein powders. The trend has been getting the full social media influencer treatment, making ripples on TikTok and Instagram with fitness buffs calling insect protein a game-changer in their regimens.

Still, as the industry marches forward and markets more directly to humans, a nagging question keeps coming up: is insect farming cruel?

Couldn’t hurt a fly?

To answer that, scientists are investigating the notion of sentience. Invertebrates have historically been considered insentient, but a growing body of research shows that it’s more complicated than previously thought.

Lars Chittka is a professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University in London and the author of The Mind of a Bee. He has conducted and reviewed hundreds of experiments to observe cognition- and emotion-like states in bees and other insects. “The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons – unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds,” Chittka writes in Scientific American. He points to ants rescuing nest mates buried under rubble and bumblebees seeming to experience joy, noting that “bees and other insects also form long-term memories about the conditions under which they were hurt.”

While there are no universally accepted criteria to determine invertebrate sentience, Chittka uses a framework developed by the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Jonathan Birch, associate professor and cognition researcher, recently led a five-year project called Foundations of Animal Sentience that devised eight criteria, which include exhibiting self-protective behaviour and whether an animal values an analgesic when injured. Birch’s work on sentience led to the inclusion of octopuses, crabs and lobsters (all invertebrates) in the U.K.’s Animal Welfare Act in 2022.

Chittka, with other researchers, mapped hundreds of studies against Birch’s eight criteria and found, for example, that adult flies and mosquitos satisfied six, which indicates strong evidence of sentience according to Birch’s grading scheme.

Of course, establishing cows and pigs as sentient hasn’t prevented cruelty in factory farming, but Chittka notes it has led to legislation that pain and distress should be minimized.

“Science tells us,” Chittka writes, “that the methods used to kill farmed insects – including baking, boiling and microwaving – have the potential to cause intense suffering.” Other academics call for applying the animal sentience “precautionary principle,” also devised by Birch, which states that “where there are threats of serious, negative animal welfare outcomes, lack of full scientific certainty as to the sentience of the animals in question shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent those outcomes.”

Even if insect sentience becomes accepted by the industry, implementing rigorous welfare standards and metrics is complex and species-specific, researchers note, and likely to lag behind industry growth.

At this point, the industry is a wild west, and welfare measures are mostly voluntary. (Where regulations do exist, they mostly address food safety, not welfare.) Of 20 insect producers and brands randomly selected by Corporate Knights, only four had public welfare statements.

Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe, the author of Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects, calls flies the entrepreneurs of the insect world, with a “fantastic diversity of expressions and behaviour.” On the notion of welfare, Balcombe tells Corporate Knights, a move toward insect consumption may be the lesser of two evils and preferable to the factory farming we have now.

“If they can make major dents in conventional factory farming of vertebrates, that is a good outcome.” However, “it’s a grim scenario,” he notes, “if insects turn out to be highly sentient or sentient at any level.”

It’s a grim scenario, if insects turn out to be highly sentient or sentient at any level.

 

—Jonathan Balcombe, author, Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects

It may be a trap we’re setting for ourselves. Balcombe says the insect industry “assumes a growth economy, which is a dead end we ultimately need to move away from.” In Downey Jr.’s video for FootPrint Coalition flagging insects as climate-friendly fish feed, he does not suggest that humans eat less fish. Asking consumers to cut back has always been a delicate issue in the climate movement; instead, the movement often looks for solutions that can support current consumption levels.

In the end, we just seem to get more factory farming, bringing up a question larger than how to make insect farming more humane: is now the time to ditch factory farming altogether?

Cold, hard climate math

With the Paris Agreement’s target of net-zero by 2050 fast approaching, economies are scrambling to transition to, and cement, the practices that will make up the next green industrial age. Coal mining and internal combustion engines will be a thing of the past. Does factory farming trillions of insects have a place among EVs, solar-powered homes and plant burgers? If the answer is no, supplanting entrenched industries is no small feat, and we have a small window to course correct.

“If we realize insects are sentient,” Balcombe says, “it’s more difficult to upend or end an industry that already has a foothold.”

Human–insect relations have historically been fraught with ambivalence, ranging from reverence to disgust. For ancient Egyptians, scarab beetles represented the eternal cycle of life. Jain ascetics, to avoid harming insects, gently sweep the ground in front of them as they walk. In some homes, centipedes are treated to glue traps and ants are poisoned. Cochineals give us “carmine” red pigment for food colouring and cosmetics. And, of course, bees are vociferously defended by environmentalists for the indispensable pollination they provide, which gets to the heart of how we came to farming more than a trillion insects a year: their status is determined by what they can do for us.

This approach corresponds to a mindset of solving climate change that is absent a wider appreciation for why life on Earth is worth saving in the first place. Creatures that can provide utility in cutting emissions are folded into the industrial machine and heralded, in the case of powderized crickets, as a cleantech innovation, even if the process entails suffering and the deprivation of a life in a natural habitat. It’s still factory farming, only this time it’s low carbon. Call it a kind of cold, hard climate math.

If the climate movement takes an intrinsic-value approach to insects, it may steer away from industrial-scale insect farming and embrace less morally grave alternatives that still lower greenhouse gases and boost food security. No, not certified free-range organic insects, but other innovations racing to solve agriculture’s climate problem, such as plant protein and cell-based meat.

Ultimately, it will be consumers who decide. If the insect craze amounts to crickets, it would be one time Iron Man didn’t save the world.

Christopher St. Prince is a Toronto-based journalist and fiction writer.

The post What the climate buzz around insect farming gets wrong appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On a Saturday morning last September, a line formed up Fulton Street, with many sitting patiently in folding chairs for hours in anticipation of the newest tenant: Slutty Vegan, a fast-food chain from Atlanta. It was the first location to open in the northeast, and a section of the street was closed for the occasion. Eater NY called it “sexy meatless chaos.” A jubilant crowd filed in behind a velvet rope to not only get a first taste of the menu made famous on social media, but to see the force at the centre of the enterprise, Pinky Cole.

“Slutty Vegan is no longer an Atlanta love story,” she told the crowd.

It’s been a rapid climb for the 35-year-old entrepreneur. Cole started in 2018 filling orders from a ghost kitchen, expanded to a food truck, then opened her first permanent location, all between July and October of that year. Today, she has raised US$25 million in series A investment and the business has been valued at $100 million. She also launched a foundation to seed entrepreneurs of colour, published a cookbook with Simon & Schuster (Eat Plants, B*tch) and signed a deal with Steve Madden footwear to launch a vegan sneaker.

Cole has said that her Jamaican-born father, who was sentenced to life in prison the day she was born, encouraged her while he served time to have an entrepreneurial mindset. She had grown up mostly vegetarian thanks to her Rastafarian mom and went fully vegan nine years ago, saying that “it allowed me to be at my most optimal health.” After losing her first (vegetarian) restaurant in a fire, she eventually went after her dream of providing Atlanta’s west end with late-night vegan food options beyond salad and french fries.

“I knew if I named it ‘Pinky’s Vegan,’ nobody was coming,” Cole told the Baltimore Sun. “But if I named it Slutty Vegan, people would react.”

With burgers called Ménage à Trois, Super Slut and One Night Stand and the eponymous Slutty Fries, Cole has gone all-in on a radical update of what many call “SAD” (the standard American diet). Keeping some key principles of conventional fast food (speed, uniformity, brand familiarity, taste), Cole’s take is sex-positive, cholesterol free and resolute about making meatless comfort food accessible to the Black community. In many ways, Slutty Vegan synthesizes the tectonic shifts in American life since the origins of fast food (the civil rights movement, two waves of feminism, the environmental and animal rights movements). She is putting mainstream fast food on notice.

Cole is part of a new wave of vegan fast food proprietors who are looking to shake up the burgers-and-fries industry and a Black vegan food movement that includes two other start-ups that came on the scene in 2022: L.A.-based Hart House, founded by comedian Kevin Hart, and Vegan Wangs, founded in Atlanta by N’namdi Arinze. While big fast-food chains attempt to perform the balancing act of cutting beef emissions without cutting production (keeping consumers and ranchers happy), Cole and her peers are ditching it completely. The foundation of all their strategies: make the food undeniably tasty and as close as possible to what diners are used to.

Fast food’s existential crisis

It was in San Bernardino, California, the birthplace of fast food, that brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald first applied the principles of an assembly line to a commercial kitchen, calling it the Speedee Service System. In 1954, their busy restaurant caught the attention of Ray Kroc, a serial entrepreneur who saw the potential to scale the business to new heights. Kroc eventually manoeuvred the brothers out of the McDonald’s brand and expanded it into an international fast-food juggernaut.

The American roadside soon became adorned with golden arches and red-and-white buckets. By the end of the century, about a quarter of adults in the United States visited a fast-food restaurant on any given day. This new way of eating delivered on the promises of the post-war 1950s: prosperity, abundance, convenience and reliability. Today, the United States’ big-name quick-service restaurants (QSRs) are in more than 100 countries and expanding aggressively across India and China.

But over the last two decades, “the dark side of the all-American meal,” as Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, put it, has turned more consumers off meat. A sobering range of concerns, including deadly foodborne diseases, the horrors of abattoirs and the rainforest-clearing, climate-heating impacts of beef, have taken the lustre off fast food. One analysis showed that the CO2 emissions of a Quarter Pounder came to three kilograms per burger (compared to 0.12 kilos for a McPlant burger). That’s the equivalent of driving a car 16 kilometres. The 50 billion burgers Americans eat each year represent 50 billion mini carbon bombs in the U.S. alone.

With growing concerns about the high climate cost of commercial beef, fast-food brands have responded largely by coalescing around the “sustainable beef” movement while making bold net-zero pledges. McDonald’s, a signatory to the UN Race to Zero and a founding member of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, has a target of net-zero emissions by 2050. It’s also committed to reducing restaurant and office greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 36% by 2030 (from a 2015 baseline) and supply chain emissions intensity by 31% over the same period. Its latest progress report noted only a 2.9% reduction of office and retail emissions and a 7.8% reduction in supply chain emissions. Restaurant Brands International, whose portfolio includes Burger King, has also pledged to go net-zero by 2050.

The second fast-food revolution – hold the beef

Plant Power Fast Food was one of the first vegan chains in North America when it opened in 2016. Co-founder and former CEO Jeff Harris, who admittedly had reservations about America’s fast-food habit but knew it wasn’t going away, wanted to be the answer to the question “Who can become the vegan McDonald’s?” Part of his strategy was to recruit talent from the fast-food establishment to manage the operational challenges of growth and to work toward price parity with McDonald’s. He also avoided the pitfalls of “crunchy granola vegetarian restaurants,” as he put it, by remaining loyal to the enduring components of fast-food menus. Today, Plant Power has 12 locations in California and Nevada.

In Canada, Odd Burger has ambitious plans to disrupt the status quo of fast food. Like Slutty Vegan, it had humble early days as a food truck. CEO and co-founder James McInnes wanted more, and in 2017, he opened Canada’s first vegan fast food restaurant, then built a manufacturing facility where the company controls much of its own supply chain and does research and development. In 2021, Odd Burger became the first vegan fast food company in the world to go public (trading on the TSX Venture as ODD). Odd Burger has at least nine locations, with more planned in Canada, and a deal with a Swiss-based investment firm to develop up to 50 locations in Florida and Europe.

McInnes, who came from the tech world, says his strategy is to compete on all fronts by developing smooth franchising operations for ease of growth, leveraging automation to achieve price parity and investing heavily in R&D to perfect taste. He also has the grassroots piece, enabling customers to become investors “so they feel they are part of something, not just buying the product.” For McInnes, the stakes are high. “McDonald’s is not going to save us anytime soon,” he says. “The world needs a fast-food chain that aligns with people’s vision and ethics.” In a small affirmation of how things can change, Odd Burger’s CFO, Ted Sehl, is a former McDonald’s Canada executive (and is now vegan).

Irrespective of what might motivate consumers to try it, vegan fast food boasts much lower emissions than the “sustainable beef” approach, which relies heavily on offsetting emissions rather than reducing them. A life-cycle assessment from the University of Michigan showed that a Beyond Burger (sold at A&W, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr. and others), as one example, produces 90% fewer GHGs compared to a beef burger. In a Good Food Institute report on the state of the plant-based-alternatives industry, Caroline Bushnell, VP of corporate engagement, said, “Alternative proteins are to meat production as renewables are to energy: the future.” But, she noted, investment is “pennies on the dollar compared with investment in electric vehicles and renewable energy.”

McDonald’s is not going to save us anytime soon. The world needs a fast-food chain that aligns with people’s vision and ethics.

—James McInnes, CEO, Odd Burger

Still, global plant-based meat sales passed US$5 billion in 2021, and these vegan chains are as growth-minded as they are planet-conscious. As Pinky Cole told The Washington Post, she believes Slutty Vegan will be “bigger than McDonald’s and Burger King and Chick-fil-A.” Next Level Burger, which operates nine locations in the U.S., announced a $20-million fundraising round in late 2022, a stepping stone to CEO Matthew de Gruyter’s goal of opening 1,000 locations. With global fast-food sales expected to increase by 50% to nearly US$1 trillion by 2028, conditions for these big ambitions are promising.

And while it’s uncertain this new wave will overtake McDonald’s and Burger King, the big chains are listening. The last few years have seen a round of flirtations with vegan options, with varying zeal. In February, McDonald’s rolled out McPlant nuggets in 1,400 German locations; however, it wrapped up a test run of the McPlant burger at 500 U.S. locations, with no firm plans of rolling it out nationally. While Burger King U.K. has set a target of a 50% meat-free menu by 2030 and has done fully plant-based pop-ups, other chains have tested plant-based menu items and have discontinued them altogether.

When this happens, however, gaps in the market are opened for disruptors like Cole and McInnes to move in and meet demand, often in vegan food deserts. Case in point: Arinze opened Vegan Wangs in Atlanta last summer when KFC took Beyond Meat chicken wings off the menu after a limited-run pilot.

If they do succeed, we may be witnessing a second fast-food revolution. In the 1950s, the assembly-line model was the big disruptor, then became the industry standard. This time, it might be Slutty Vegan and Odd Burger setting the trends. The planet would certainly benefit. And if they flip the industry on its head, Cole and McInnes deserve to be in business-school textbooks beside Ray Kroc and the other founding fathers of fast food. What they have over the big guys is not easy to recreate in a corporate board room. As Cole says, “There’s nothing new about burgers and fries … it’s the intention behind it.”

The post Vegan restaurateurs are putting the fast food industry on notice appeared first on Corporate Knights.