McDonald's to test veggie burger in Canada

NEW YORK - Fast food giant McDonald's is dipping another foot into the world of plant-based "meat," announcing plans on Thursday to test a vegetarian burger in Canada.

The "PLT," standing for "Plant.Lettuce.Tomato," will be available for 12 weeks in 28 restaurants in Ontario starting on September 30.

"McDonald's has a proud legacy of fun, delicious and craveable food -- and now, we're extending that to a test of a juicy, plant-based burger," said Ann Wahlgren, vice president of global menu strategy.

"We've been working on our recipe and now we're ready to hear feedback from our customers."

Plant-based protein is not a completely new pursuit for McDonald's. The fast-food giant has launched with Nestle and vegetarian burger in Germany.

This time, McDonald's plans to partner with the fast-growing Beyond Meat, which developed a patty that McDonald's described as "delicious, juicy, perfectly dressed plant-based burger" with "the iconic McDonald's taste customers have come to love."

McDonald's rivals are also making a push into the fast-growing business.

Burger King in April unveiled a vegetarian "Whopper," while KFC, also with Beyond Meat, has sold plant-based nuggets.

While meat alternatives have been around for decades, a new generation of companies including Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat have employed technologies to produce proteins with taste and texture that more closely approximate meat.

Large food companies are also becoming more active in the space, with Nestle planning on October 1 to launch its "Awesome Burger" in the United States after unveiling the "Incredible Burger" in Europe.

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source: news.abs-cbn.com

Jollibee eyes China, US as next 'pillars of growth'

MANILA - Jollibee Foods Corp on Monday said it planned to have 3 strong pillars of growth, namely the Philippines, China, and the US. 

Jollibee intended to grow its foreign business faster than its local units, the country's largest fastfood chain operator said in a disclosure to the stock exchange. 

"The long-term goals of JFC are to have 3 strong pillars of growth – Philippines, China and USA. However, it does not mean that the Philippine business will slow down, the intention is to have its foreign business grow faster than its Philippine business," JFC said.

JFC aims to fulfill this goal in "10 years or more," the statement said. 

The group has been growing its footprint in the US, with its most recent acquisition of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in a deal worth a total $350 million (P18 billion).

Last year, Jollibee took a 47-percent stake in Mexican chain Tortas Frontera. It also took full ownership of US-based burger chain Smashburger.

Jollibee may also open its first store in China in the near future, its CEO Ernesto Tanmantiong said in an earlier interview with CNBC. The group operates the Dunkin Donuts franchise in China. 

In the Philippines, Jollibee, Chowking, Greenwhich, Red Ribbon, Mang Inasal, and Burger King stores are part of the JFC portfolio.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

The secret of Mos Burger's success in Japan

TOKYO - Hideyuki Sato, 38, who has loved trees and flowers since his childhood, believes his current job is the most suitable one for him.

As chief leader of the agribusiness group at Mos Food Services Inc., the operator of Mos Burger hamburger restaurants, Sato procures vegetables to be used for hamburgers directly from farmers across Japan.

Unlike many other fast food chains that prepare hamburgers beforehand, Mos Food Services starts making a hamburger with fresh vegetables after it receives an order.

The company, which runs about 1,400 shops across the country, sticks to a policy of not using vegetables that are produced abroad or preserved for long periods in refrigerators as it believes its customers favor its food because of freshness.

Sato and his colleagues go to see contract farmers many times a year to keep themselves updated on how they are growing vegetables and confirm whether they are not using any excessive amounts of pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

"We always take care so customers can eat our food without any worries," Sato said.

Mos Burger restaurants are open at all times of the year and need to prepare fresh vegetables such as tomatoes, lettuce and onions, each day.

The Tokyo-based company has thus contracted with some 3,000 farmers from Hokkaido to Okinawa Prefecture, making it possible to use vegetables from northern Japan during the summer, while procuring those from southern Japan during the winter.

"I travel around to see those farmers in more than half a year, and don't spend much time at home," he said.

Sato, from Koshigaya, Saitama Prefecture, enjoyed climbing mountains with his father in his childhood and developed a liking for trees, plants and flowers in due course.

After studying agriculture at university, Sato entered Mos Food Services where he believed he would work with vegetables.

"Vegetables on a hamburger may just be a supporting player to make meat taste better, but they're important ingredients," he said.

"I like developing new recipes using vegetables," said Sato.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Chile McDonald's patron finds mouse tail in burger

SANTIAGO (AFP) - Health authorities in Chile on Tuesday confirmed what one man has claimed for weeks: that he found a mouse tail in his McDonald's hamburger.

Back in June, the man noticed something unusual when he bit into the hamburger he bought at a McDonald's restaurant in the southern town of Temuco, some 700km south of the Chilean capital Santiago.

He said it appeared to be a mouse tail, and filed a complaint with local health authorities.

On Tuesday, Mr Waldo Armstrong, head of the regional health department, confirmed what the customer had feared.

source: straitstimes.com

'Test-tube burger' to herald end to animal-meat industry?

VANCOUVER - The world's first "test-tube" meat, a hamburger made from a cow's stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.

Post's aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.

The ingredients for his first burger are "still in a laboratory phase," he said, but by fall "we have committed ourselves to make a couple of thousand of small tissues, and then assemble them into a hamburger."

Post, chair of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said his project is funded with 250,000 euros from an anonymous private investor motivated by "care for the environment, food for the world, and interest in life-transforming technologies."

Post spoke at a symposium titled "The Next Agricultural Revolution" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Speakers said they aim to develop such "meat" products for mass consumption to reduce the environmental and health costs of conventional food production.

Conventional meat and dairy production requires more land, water, plants and disposal of waste products than almost all other human foods, they said.

The global demand for meat is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, said American scientist Nicholas Genovese, who organized the symposium.

"But the majority of earth's pasture lands are already in use," he said, so conventional livestock producers can only meet the booming demand by further expansion into nature.

The result would be lost biodiversity, more greenhouse and other gases, and an increase in disease, he said.

In 2010 a report by the United Nations Environment Program called for a global vegetarian diet.

"Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing global catastrophe," Patrick Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine told reporters.

"More to the point, it's incredibly ready to topple ... it's inefficient technology that hasn't changed fundamentally for millennia," he said.

"There's been a blind spot in the science and technology community (of livestock production) as an easy target."

Brown, who said he is funded by an American venture capital firm and has two start-ups in California, said he will devote the rest of his life to develop products that mimic meat but are made entirely from vegetable sources.

He is working "to develop and commercialize a product that can compete head on with meat and dairy products based on taste and value for the mainstream consumer, for people who are hard-core meat and cheese lovers who can't imagine ever giving that up, but could be persuaded if they had a product with all taste and value."

Brown said developing meat from animal cells in a laboratory will still have a high environmental cost, and so he said he will rely only on plant sources.

Both scientists said no companies in the existing meat industry have expressed interest.

source: interaksyon.com