Nestlé upgrades its plant-based burger in Europe

With more and more people looking for great-tasting plant-based food, the market for meat alternatives is growing fast and changing even faster. That is why Nestlé is introducing a further upgrade to its flagship Garden Gourmet Sensational Burger, just a few months after the previous version launched.

The new recipe features the meatiest plant-based flavor yet and a juicier than ever texture, all while touting a Nutri-Score ‘A’ rating. It has the crumbly texture and ‘hand-made’ shape of a great beef burger, stemming from newly-developed techniques for working with plant-based proteins.

The new burger will start to appear across Europe from October, with Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, and Spain amongst the first countries. It will be available in supermarkets and to restaurants and foodservice customers.

Wayne England, head of Nestlé’s food business, said, “We see that people are increasingly looking for alternatives that are good for them and for the planet. Nestlé wants to lead the way in making plant-based foods part of everybody’s everyday life. That’s why we’ve introduced so many great new products in the past 18 months.”

The Garden Gourmet Sensational Burger still has the best nutritional values of any plant-based burger on the market, with a Nutri-Score ‘A’ rating. It also accounts for around 80% less CO2 emissions, water, and land use than a beef burger.

The burger combines natural soy, natural plant extracts (beetroot, carrot, apple, and hibiscus), rapeseed, and coconut oil with proprietary fermenting plant-based method ingredients boost the ‘umami’ flavor of the burger.

Torsten Pohl, head of the Nestlé Product Technology Center in Singen, Germany, which specializes in plant-based foods, said, “Our goal is to offer people the best plant-based meat alternatives in terms of taste, texture, flavor and nutrition. We are able to leverage new technologies and key learnings to continuously improve the plant-based burger recipe.”

People are continuing to look for different ways to eat more healthily by diversifying their protein intake and lowering their diets’ environmental footprint. Global research for Nestlé has shown that around a third of people now consider themselves either vegan, vegetarian, or flexitarian, meaning they are consuming less or no meat.

Nestlé is committed to providing more delicious, nutritious, and sustainable plant-based options for consumers worldwide. In the past 18 months, Nestlé has introduced new plant-based burgers, sausages, mince, new plant-based alternatives to chicken and tuna, as well as an array of plant-based meals including pizzas and lasagna. It has also debuted a fully plant-based ‘bacon cheeseburger’ for foodservice in the US.