The Rebel Whopper Rolls Out Across Europe

On November 12, 2019, Burger King and Unilever's The Vegetarian Butcher launched the Rebel Whopper simultaneously in more than 2,500 restaurants across 25 European countries, one of the largest single-day product rollouts in the chain's history. The plant-based patty came from The Vegetarian Butcher, the Dutch company Jaap Korteweg founded in The Hague in 2010 and sold to Unilever at the end of 2018. The deal put a meat-free Whopper in front of ordinary fast-food customers across a continent at once, rather than trickling out market by market. For Korteweg, a former arable farmer who turned vegetarian after a 1997 swine fever outbreak, it was the payoff of a decade spent trying to make plants taste like meat instead of asking meat eaters to give up the taste they liked.