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Vegan burger joint loses bun fight as diners beg for beef

Honest Burgers is among several chains shutting meat-free restaurants — a sign that the plant-based revolution is tailing off

When Honest Burgers opened its first entirely vegan restaurant [in London] in January, it was ready to serve the nation’s new wave of plant-food obsessives.

Except they didn’t come — or not enough of them. Every day, “dozens” of people would arrive at V Honest and try to order a chicken or beefburger.

Just six months after opening, the restaurant, near Leicester Square in central London will revert to selling meat after Honest Burgers’ co-founder, Tom Barton, concluded there was simply not enough demand. He said the hype around plant-based diets, fuelled by social media, had not translated into sales.

It is one of several restaurant chains to scale back its plant-based plans. Burger King recently ended a month-long trial for a vegan restaurant in Leicester Square and has no plans to revive it. The US vegan fast food chain By Chloe closed its four UK restaurants last year, shortly after it was bought out of bankruptcy. Pret a Manger bought rival sandwich chain Eat in 2019 and pledged to turn “as many as possible” of the 94 shops it acquired into Veggie Prets. It later closed the Eat shops, citing the pandemic, and there are still only ten Veggie Prets in the UK, six years after the first opened.

Neat Burger, a vegan restaurant chain whose investors include Formula One driver Sir Lewis Hamilton — a vegan whose bulldog, Roscoe, is said to enjoy a plant-based diet — said it planned to open 19 new sites across London by the end of this year on top of the five it already owned. So far it has opened two more and plans to open another this year. It insisted it was still seeing “strong demand”.

Barton, 36, whose chain has almost 50 restaurants around Britain, said: “We had dozens of people every single day asking for beef burgers and chicken. Ultimately, it didn’t make business sense for us.

“I think people’s food beliefs are one of those things that people are very vocal and passionate about on social media and can potentially paint a bigger picture [of veganism] than is actually realistic.

“There have been some spectacular failures in this space. By Chloe was a big, profitable business and full of young Instagrammers with chihuahuas enjoying the food, but that business folded as well, so it’s a difficult space to make work.

“We gave it a go . . . but, sadly, as a concept, it doesn’t make commercial sense for us. I know other businesses had the same trouble. I think everyone’s feeling it’s just not quite converting as well as it needs to in order to be a viable business.”

Barton said many people were not prepared to pay more for vegan options, which apparently cost more to produce. Honest Burgers’ vegan “beef” burgers, “chicken” burgers and chilli burgers are 75p more expensive than the meat alternatives, for example, at £13.75.

He said: “Vegan food is coming in at a higher price than its counterparts, which, for people who don’t understand the amount of ingredients and process that goes into these foods . . . sounds completely bonkers.

“To turn plants into burgers there is a lot of development. Vegan mayonnaise, cheese, ‘meat’ grains, they are all more expensive than the animal-based counterparts because there’s a lot more process that goes into them.”

Fewer than 2 per cent of UK adults say they follow a vegan diet compared with 11 per cent who do not eat meat, according to the market researchers Mintel.

Richard Caines, a senior food and drink analyst at the consumer research firm, said: “If you run a restaurant that is completely vegan or plant-based, your target market is small and maybe a bit out of sync with the consumer context.”

Instead, many restaurants and supermarkets are focusing on catering to flexitarians. Despite ending its trial of a vegan-only restaurant, Burger King has pledged half its menu will be meat-free by 2030 in an attempt to reduce its carbon emissions. It said it had planned no other “meat-free takeovers” but had not ruled out a permanent meat-free restaurant in the future.

A spokeswoman added: “We had queues around the block on the opening day, and we even had a selection of popular items, such as the plant-based Cheeezeburger and plant-based Bakon Double Cheeeze XL, sell out.”

Analysis suggests faux-meat fatigue may be setting in. The UK retail value of meat substitutes, which includes supermarket sales, is estimated to have risen 9 per cent, from £551 million to £598 million in 2021, a slower rate of growth than the 34 per cent increase of a year earlier.

Almost half (47 per cent) of people say that replacing meat with vegetables and pulses is more appealing than using meat substitutes, Mintel said. One restaurateur said the “halo effect” — where meat alternatives were seen as better for health and the environment — was waning.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-beef-x7kqj30wb