Swedish Burger Kings Dares You To Tell Meat And Plant-Based Burgers Apart

As plant-based fast food continues to skyrocket in popularity, many have questioned whether even the most cutting-edge replica meats can ever fully supplant their animal-based counterparts. In that spirit, Burger King locations across Sweden will let the people decide, tasking customers with a blind taste test between meat and not-meat.

Newsweek reports that all of the country's BK locations will debut a new 50/50 Menu, out of its conviction that there's no discernible difference between its alternative burger/chicken options and their carnivorous equivalents. Restaurants will be "switching some of their normal Whopper and Crispy Chicken burgers with their new meat-free Rebel Whopper and Rebel Chicken King burgers" at random, whenever ordered from the new menu.

Customers will be encouraged to guess which burger they've received, but "The only way to confirm if you have a plant-based or meat patty is by scanning a code on the box via the Burger King app," because no transaction is complete any longer without downloading branding to your smartphone. There are no current plans to roll out the guessing game in the U.S., but we'd hardly be surprised if the Impossible Whopper's planned expansion employs a similar "game."

While Burger King Sweden is insistent that it's "really proud of how hard it is to tell our plant-based burgers apart from real meat," it'll be curious to see what percentage of customers are actually tricked by the difference. While numerous mock burgers are now able to approximate the sear and mouthfeel of a burger, the taste and particularly the smell are fairly noticeable in their dissimilarities. We'll leave it to the good people of Sweden to report back.