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Australian burger chain Grill’d has ditched meat today as part of a ‘Meatless Monday’ – and is only serving vegan patties for 24 hours.
Grill’d, which has 137 outlets across the country, says the demand for vegan options is ‘very real’. For today, it will only be selling Beyond Burger patties.
According to Grill’d, it has seen sales of its meat-free burgers increase, with a corresponding decrease in the sale of its meat burgers.
Vegan burgers
“Sales of Grill’d’s meat-free burgers grew more than 100 percent in the past year alone,” Grill’d Founder and Managing Director, Simon Crowe, said. “The biggest increase we’ve seen is in the number of meat-eaters who are now choosing plant-based options – especially in the under 30s age group.
“We genuinely believe plant-based alternatives will form a huge part of the future of burgers, especially with our new menu selection of Beyond Burgers that taste just like beef.
“That’s why we are encouraging all our customers to go meat-free with us this Monday and try out our new plant-based menu. This new launch is a part of Grill’d’s ongoing commitment to innovation.”
The chain has longterm plans to reduce its meat sales, and announced ambitions to have a 50 percent vegan menu by 2020, earlier this year.
Vegan Australia
Australia is considered to be a very vegan-friendly country – with online food blog Chef’s Pencil ranking it number one in a top 10 list, using Google Trends data.
“Google assigns a score for each location (broken down by country and city) that shows the interest level of a given topic by comparing searches made for that topic to all Google searches made in that particular location,” says Chef’s Pencil.
“For example, if Google assigns a 100 score to Australia for veganism searches and a 78 score for the United States, it means that the percentage of Aussies who searched for veganism is much higher than the percentage of Americans searching for the same topic.
“It doesn’t mean that, in absolute terms, there were more searches for veganism in Australia compared to the US – this would be quite unusual as Australia has a population 10 times smaller than the US.”
