The meat-free fast-food category is in decline. Once positioned as the future of quick service, it had become flat, apologetic, and increasingly forgettable. Even Burger King, one of the category’s early leaders across Europe, was feeling the impact as sales plateaued, momentum slowed, and the category narrative lost its edge.
The meat-free fast-food category is in decline. Once positioned as the future of quick service, it had become flat, apologetic, and increasingly forgettable. Even Burger King, one of the category’s early leaders across Europe, was feeling the impact as sales plateaued, momentum slowed, and the category narrative lost its edge.
At the heart of the problem was a contradiction. Burger King is one of the original challenger brands, known for irreverence, confidence, and cultural provocation. Yet when it came to its meat-free menu, that character had quietly disappeared. Like much of the category, Burger King had slipped into a convention that framed meat-free as the “sorry cousin” of meat, defined by what it wasn’t, marketed cautiously, and stripped of attitude. The category didn’t lack products; it lacked availability and a point of view.
Rival rejected the category’s apologetic framing of meat-free food and interrogated the deeper cultural dynamics shaping the space. While Burger King had already invested heavily in rational, functional research around frequency, barriers, and reasons for choosing meat-free, the missing layer was in the cultural and emotional signals that were shaping the conversation.
Through immersion in the meat-free world, Rival brought an insight to the surface: people who choose meat-free aren’t apologizing; they’re expressing who they are. Beliefs, humor, contradiction, rebellion, and identity all shape a community that is loud, opinionated, and anything but sorry.
Rather than defaulting to category logic, Rival mined meat-free microcultures to understand the tensions, identities, and contradictions shaping the space.
Across European markets, with a particular focus on Germany as Burger King’s largest and most influential market, we generated over 40 distinct insights. This depth of cultural mining gave Burger King a clear, ownable campaign positioning — one that treated meat-free not as a compromise, but as a space defined by confidence, character, and cultural relevance. The opportunity became clear: bring Burger King’s irreverent challenger spirit back and make meat-free relevant outside of the walls of your local Burger King.
Rival worked across EMEA, prioritizing Germany as the lead insight market while ensuring the positioning held across regions. To ensure the positioning held true in Burger King’s most important market, the work was grounded in thinking locally while maintaining a cohesive idea across EMEA. The result was a set of campaign positioning decks along with initial creative , giving Burger King a clear, ownable challenger platform to shape its next wave of meat-free campaign work and reinforce its position as a category leader for alternative to meat on the go.
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