White Castle in April 2018 added a new burger to its menu, an Impossible Slider. The item was made with the plant-based fake-meat product from Impossible Foods. It was thicker than the chain’s traditional beef slider, and it gave non-meat-eaters or the vegetarian adjacent an option when they want a burger but one made from plants.
The result was a gold rush of sorts. Burger King would join the fray the next year, and several other major fast-food chains scrambled to work with either Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat to get fake-meat versions of their products on their menus. We had fake sausage breakfast sandwiches from Dunkin’, one-day fake-chicken tests from KFC, fake sausage pizza from Pizza Hut and a McPlant test from McDonald’s.
Restaurant shows, notably the National Restaurant Association show in May, have since been filled with companies jockeying for what many still believe is a major growth business—plant-based meat.
Today, as we’ve said before, the plant-based trend at fast-food restaurants hasn’t quite taken off the way many thought it would five years ago. Demand for such products simply isn’t strong enough to warrant including on many fast-food menus, at least in great numbers.
But that doesn’t make that decision by White Castle any less gutsy.
I’m not sure people quite appreciate just how odd it seemed five years ago that White Castle of all companies would be the one to give plant-based meat a go on a chainwide basis. The chain is concentrated largely in the Midwest and is known for its low-priced burgers customers eat by the “sackful.” Many of its locations are in low-income areas.
It doesn’t have to do so much with the plant-based nature of the product. White Castle had been pushing more veggie-based burgers for years, notably with its Veggie Slider. The Impossible Slider was a simple expansion of that.
But the plant-based trend had emerged in previous years as something one only found at high-end restaurants catering to higher-income consumers. They experimented with burgers made from the plant-based meat that was processed to appear more like real burgers, to the point where it was “bloody.”
Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, however, hoped that getting into the fast-food business would be a ticket to mass appeal.
The White Castle product gave Impossible Foods the in it was looking for. The chain tested the product in April 2018 and then added it to its permanent menu five months later. The next year it upgraded the product and by 2020 it gave customers an option for dairy-free cheese. The company has since become one of the more innovative chains in the country under CEO Lisa Ingram, with early adoption of robots and AI ordering, among other things.
Its early addition of a plant-based slider, however, gave White Castle a lot of publicity early in a trend that would generate all kinds of attention in subsequent years, and that meant a lot for a mid-sized regional chain—far more than it would for, say, McDonald’s.
White Castle’s system sales in the years since the introduction provide at least some evidence that the product has done exactly what the chain wanted. System sales are up 21% over that period, due entirely to a 30% increase in average unit volumes, according to data from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic. This, despite a 10% decline in unit count over that period.
By jumping on the trend early, White Castle was able to get a benefit of first-mover advantage. But it also proved that there is at least some market among major fast-food chains for a plant-based product.
It remains to be seen where the trend goes from here. Most likely, it will take reconfigured products that are less processed, or just more time to get a broader set of customers accustomed to the idea before plant-based meat takes its place on larger chains’ menus.
But White Castle at least had the guts to try it first and has reaped the benefits in the years since then. And that made it an impressive move.