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- Max Burgers is selling less beef to address the climate crisis.
- The chain labels menu items with carbon footprints and promotes chicken and plant-based burgers.
- Between 2015 and 2021, emissions dropped 30% and meals without red meat grew to 18% of sales.
One of Sweden's oldest burger chains wants its customers to stop eating so much red meat.
It might sound counterintuitive, but Max Burgers, a family-owned fast-food company, realized way back in 2007 that it couldn't address the climate crisis while continuing to sell as much beef. Beef has the largest climate impact of any food, largely because cows burp methane and need vast amounts of land.
Since then, Max Burgers has labeled menu items with their carbon footprints and started offering a lot more chicken and plant-based burgers. The company wants half the meals it sells to be free of red meat. It came close last year, when about 46% of meals sold across 188 locations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Poland were red-meat-free, said Kaj Török, its chief sustainability officer. Denmark on its own surpassed the goal.
All the changes are making a dent in the chain's greenhouse-gas emissions, which dropped by 30% between 2015 and 2021. Török said Max Burgers has remained one of Sweden's most profitable restaurant chains, even as plant-based, vegetarian, or "lacto-vegetarian" options with dairy products grew to 18% of sales volume in 2021, up from 2% in 2014.
"Until we hit the pandemic, the transformation was really fast. In the last 12 months, we've struggled to keep that percentage up," Török said, adding that he thinks customers may be choosing meat because they see it as getting more for their money during a period of high inflation.
Now the company, which is privately owned and doesn't disclose its financial information, is exploring how to communicate the health benefits of a plant-based diet.
Max Burgers' climate strategy is an outlier in the restaurant industry, particularly compared with US fast-food chains that have been quick to abandon plant-based burgers when they don't test well in small markets. Even the salad chain Sweetgreen this month added steak to its menu in hopes of boosting sales at dinnertime. A Los Angeles vegan restaurant also announced in April that it was rebranding by adding meat, dairy, and eggs to the menu.
Both Sweetgreen and the Los Angeles restaurant, now called Sage Regenerative Kitchen & Brewery, said they were focusing on "regenerative agriculture" to meet their climate commitments. Fast-food giants like McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Burger King are similarly focused on the farming practices in their supply chains.
But research is limited on the climate effects of regenerative agriculture, a loosely defined set of farming practices that aims to improve soil health so it stores more carbon, uses less chemical fertilizers and water, and boosts biodiversity.
Raychel Santo, a food and climate research associate at World Resources Institute, told Business Insider that while storing more carbon in the soil may offset some emissions from beef production, it's unlikely to offset all the emissions from a cow's life cycle.
"There are a few studies that have even claimed carbon-negative or carbon-neutral beef, but they've only looked at the last phase of the cow's life," Santo said.
She cited an analysis by her colleagues of research comparing the environmental effects of conventional livestock production, where cows end up on a feedlot, with "alternative" practices such as organic, pasture-raised, grass-fed, and regenerative. The analysis found that alternative practices tended to have higher total climate footprints (but better animal welfare) than conventional ones.
"That's not to say conventional systems are better," Santo said. "It's about balancing and recognizing these trade-offs."
Santo said that either way, people in wealthy countries need to reduce their beef consumption for the world to meet its climate goals. In the US and Europe, people eat the equivalent of three and two burgers a week, respectively. Cutting that consumption in half would make a huge dent in planet-warming emissions.
Török said 'less but better beef' is the mantra of researchers he's spoke to.
He added that because Max Burgers is family-owned, it can take more risks than publicly-traded fast food chains worried about their stock price.
MAX Burgers has introduced many iterations of plant-based and chicken options to improve the taste, and scrapped those that didn't land with customers. A falafel burger launched in 2009 was eliminated several years later because it wasn't popular with consumers, for example. In 2016, the company quintupled its plant-based options, Török said, including a "green burger" that's been changed several times.
"Taste is our secret climate weapon," Török said. "If something doesn't work, we try to make it better."