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00:00This is Nigel Travis.
00:09What I've got here is some Leighton Orient programmes.
00:13And that's me when we bought the club.
00:16Nigel made serious money flogging burgers for Burger King.
00:20I never thought I'd become chairman, but I'd love it.
00:23It's amazing how many similarities there are between
00:27a football club like Leighton Orient and brands like Burger King.
00:31Is it a competitive industry? The answer is 100% yes.
00:34It's like football.
00:37The burger, the iconic snack born in America
00:40and lovingly adopted by Britain.
00:42Beef, cheese, veggie and now even fake meat.
00:46It seems like we can't get enough of them.
00:49It's simple food and it shouldn't be too expensive
00:52and you can make really good money on a burger.
00:55Like sinking into a warm bath on a cold winter's night.
01:02It's soft and it's succulent and it's juicy
01:04and it's full of yummy flavours.
01:06How did a cheap American fast food...
01:09The bright red and yellow colours.
01:11It's very difficult to think of anything about McDonald's
01:14that one could say that's complimentary.
01:17...become a competitive business worth more than £5 billion
01:20to the British economy.
01:22We thought we had a mega difference which was that our product was better.
01:27Since the mid-70s, the United Kingdom has been home to a bitter war.
01:32I never worried about the Burger King down the street.
01:37Probably tastes better with our special sauce in it.
01:39One which is still raging today.
01:42This industry is really a dogfight.
01:44It's really, really difficult.
01:47Billion pound companies fighting over every bun, gherkin and french fry
01:52with the aim of becoming number one.
01:54The burger story starts in America.
02:04The conquering of the Wild West in the 1800s gave rise to the golden age of beef.
02:10Good news for European migrants arriving in New York
02:13on the new Hamburg America shipping line.
02:16Cheap, chopped beef was a familiar taste of home.
02:20Rapid industrialisation from the 1870s meant these new Americans also needed food on the go.
02:27The Hamburg style sandwich was a hit and brand new restaurants opened up to sell them.
02:35By the 1950s, it was happy days as the teenagers were devouring burgers.
02:43When there isn't time to eat out, you simply drive in.
02:46Yes, you've got to hand it to them.
02:48They get things moving.
02:49Americans are big eaters, but they're hungry in a hurry.
02:53In the UK, things were a little more traditional
02:56and the closest we got to fast food was a lion's tea house.
03:01But that was about to change.
03:07Hungry.
03:09Lions at the time were kind of the place to go and have cups of tea and cake and that kind of thing.
03:19They went over to the States, saw the Wimpy restaurant's concept
03:23and bought the worldwide rights in approximately 1952.
03:28Lions decided to franchise the Wimpy brand to update the image of traditional tea rooms.
03:33The first Wimpy restaurant opened in the back of a Lion's Corner tea house on Leicester Square in 1954.
03:42People were really used to that brand and it gave it a very good foothold into the market.
03:47I think what was appealing about Wimpy then was it was something different.
03:53It reflected an American trend.
03:58When you bring something innovative and new that comes from a country that people were wanting to follow,
04:05it really, you know, gave it the legs to succeed.
04:09Hot hamburgers. And that's the way the customer likes them.
04:13We loved eating these new American burgers, but in a very British way.
04:17You know, it's served on a plate. It's served to you at the table.
04:21As the sixties arrived, Wimpy went through a major period of growth.
04:26It started becoming a restaurant that people wanted to be seen in.
04:30I think what really encouraged the Wimpy brand was the demand.
04:36All sorts of locations were being considered from hotels to seafronts to entertainment venues.
04:46So we're going to cook our original quarter pound of cheese.
04:50We'll place him on the griddle.
04:53What's now known as our special sauce, when the burger was launched, that was called D84.
05:00So it came out of the Wimpy development kitchen, D, and 84 stood for the 84th batch.
05:08So we've got the onions on the base.
05:10So we've got cheese on top of the onions.
05:13And we'll put on our quarter pounder.
05:20Then our special sauce.
05:23Then our lettuce.
05:25We use an iceberg lettuce, so there's a nice crunch.
05:28That is our quarter pounder with cheese.
05:32It's our hero product.
05:42It just tastes fantastic.
05:44Every brand does need their own iconic burger, and it's just quintessentially Wimpy.
05:50By the early 1970s, globally, Wimpy were opening 13 new restaurants a month.
05:58But in America, the race was on between two other rapidly expanding burger empires, McDonald's and Burger King.
06:07And they were looking for new markets to conquer.
06:11By the 70s, the Wimpy brand definitely started to see the influence of competition.
06:19The first challenger to Wimpy's dominance was about to send over a man to launch Operation Golden Arch.
06:27Here we go. Paddy's away.
06:30This is Paul Preston.
06:31He opened the first McDonald's in the UK and introduced Britain to its most iconic product.
06:40This nine layer gastronomic indulgence is known as a Big Mac.
06:44We're going to make a Paul Preston version of a Big Mac.
06:52These are 100% pure beef patties.
06:55They each weigh 1.6 ounces.
06:59They want to sell a product that's first class in every respect.
07:04And delicious.
07:06Big Mac started in Pittsburgh with the owner operator.
07:09I think he had a competitor there, Big Boy.
07:12Big Mac was a McDonald's version of the Big Boy.
07:16I'm not even sure I could tell you what was on a Big Boy.
07:18I was just a little kid then.
07:23What can you tell us about the McDonald's Big Mac clothes?
07:26Oh, secret recipe. Can't release that.
07:29Some onions.
07:31I'm going to add some lettuce to each piece, iceberg lettuce.
07:38Chosen for reasons of texture more than anything.
07:41All shredded finely.
07:43I'm going to put some cheese to the heel.
07:46Pickles to the club.
07:48I'm going to take that club section, put it on top of the first piece.
07:52I'm going to add the crown.
07:54Voila!
07:56Paul Preston version of a Big Mac.
07:59The world's most famous burger.
08:02May it long continue.
08:04Paul's meteoric rise to McDonald's UK CEO had humble beginnings.
08:11I was 16 years old.
08:13I'd just gotten my driver's license.
08:15I said to my mother, you know, can I use the family car?
08:18And she said, of course you can.
08:20But first of all, do you have any money for gasoline?
08:23So I said, I better get myself a part-time job.
08:25Well, around the corner from where we lived, what was a McDonald's restaurant?
08:28We moved to Britain in 1974.
08:31I was the manager of the first restaurant.
08:34You got one of the great cities of the world.
08:36You had a market where people did eat out, albeit waiter service, fish and chip shops, etc.
08:43We thought there's a potential for a winner here.
08:46But in reality, it wasn't quite as easy.
08:49McDonald's has a, I think they've got a specification for just about everything except the air we breathe.
08:53And if you follow that spec, you're going to do a pretty good job.
08:58We did serve tea.
08:59That was the one of the concessions we made to the original menu.
09:03We figured, well, we got to have tea.
09:05We brewed a terrible cup of tea.
09:06We were awful.
09:08A lot of the brands that were starting to look at the UK were typically counter service or the pure takeaway brands.
09:16Whereas Wimpy still retained table service.
09:18You know, we cook fresh to order.
09:20We serve to the table.
09:21We use knives and forks and China crockery.
09:25And it was a different offering.
09:27With their unique understanding of British dining culture, Wimpy weren't too worried about the newcomer.
09:34McDonald's struggled to connect with us Brits.
09:38Nobody came in that first one, I have to say.
09:40We were pretty lonesome.
09:42And we're oftentimes struggling with the question is, well, why?
09:46Why aren't they coming in?
09:47Well, we were new boy on the block.
09:49McDonald's have been multiplying in the United States.
09:54And I suppose inevitably it was only a matter of time before they arrived here.
09:58So far they've grown comparatively slowly.
10:01The British weren't used to us.
10:03They found it a bit strange.
10:05They would come in and queue up.
10:06Well, we had multiple queues of people.
10:10Well, they would only get one queue.
10:11You'd have to kind of coax them along.
10:14The British people are very gracious.
10:15They do not break that queue.
10:18The family unit was our real target audience.
10:20And it took a while to convince mom, who's, she's a pretty tough egg.
10:26So we had to convince her that McDonald's is a good place for her, her husband and her children.
10:32That took a little help from advertising, I suppose, to prime the pump, get them to come in and try it.
10:37This clever advert educated British customers in the basics of McDonald's service.
10:43When a great day's nearly over.
10:46We didn't really tell them.
10:47It was pictorial.
10:49First of all, come to the counter.
10:51Counter service, not table service.
10:53Ordering, receiving it, go to a table.
10:56Or take away if you wish.
10:57This is finger food.
10:58It's not knife and fork.
11:00The difference at McDonald's had moved the sales needle almost immediately.
11:07The McDonald's chain is beginning to expand in the London area,
11:10making them competitive with the other giants of fast food like golden egg, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and of course, Wimpies.
11:18Next, they realized that speed was almost as important as taste.
11:22Now, you pride yourselves on the speed of your service.
11:24It really is fast food.
11:25How did you get it so fast?
11:27Food itself is not really what we talked about as being fast.
11:32The service is, in fact, fast.
11:34We did a lot to motivate the staff.
11:37We've never done a thousand pounds of sales in an hour before.
11:41What do we need to do to be able to do that?
11:44Our target times are, in fact, one minute from the time you've placed your order
11:49until the product is in your hand, with a maximum of two additional minutes being spent in a queue.
11:54Oh, it's magnificent.
11:55Very satisfying.
11:57Have you had one before?
11:59Yes.
12:00Now, are you worried about competition from British firms?
12:03No.
12:04Not at all.
12:05The arrival of McDonald's on the British scene has not until recently shown any sign of rattling the leading British hamburger chain, Wimpy.
12:13At the present count, Wimpy has over 600 restaurants in operation throughout England, whereas McDonald's have 23.
12:19Here at Notting Hill Gate, Wimpy has recently opened what they call a flagship.
12:24But by 1978, Wimpy could see McDonald's catching them and needed to adapt to avoid being overtaken.
12:31If I was Wimpy and McDonald's was coming and they were growing and I see a market changing, they probably saw a need to make some alterations.
12:40Now they've decided if you can't beat them, join them. And they've spent a million pounds on a new image.
12:46A Wimpy was built, which was a McDonald's copy. It was no longer the China plates and the waiter service. It was the counter service, etc.
12:53Now this, Mr Smell, is a fairly typical fast food. French fries? Chips, we like to call them. We're not really Americanized.
13:01I haven't got a knife and fork, though. Is that standard?
13:03No, that's quite intentional. It's in line with the way people think these days. Life is becoming much more informal.
13:09Well, I wonder, are people ready for eating this way?
13:12Oh, undoubtedly, yes. It's the thing of the future. In America, all hamburgers are sold in this way.
13:17Come on over to my place.
13:21Wimpy also stepped up their advertising with a glossy new, upbeat campaign.
13:26We'll be shaking, grilling and feeling. Come on over tonight.
13:32Something like three out of every four members of the population go into a Wimpy at some time during a year.
13:39We sell, in a week, something like a million and a half hamburgers.
13:42But just as Wimpy were working out how to fight off McDonald's, war was about to break out on two fronts.
13:49Tonight, the American-style fast food revolution now sweeping our high streets.
13:54The American invasion is being led by the world's largest hamburger chain, McDonald's.
13:59Throughout the Midlands, our streets are looking more and more like downtown New York.
14:03Last week, a second American hamburger chain, Burger King, with only one restaurant in London, announced that it intends to expand.
14:10Out of the fire!
14:16It's the 1980s and Burger King has landed in the UK, capitalising on its American roots.
14:23The taste that set America on fire is here.
14:27Out of the fire!
14:29Nigel Travis was the man who managed its expansion throughout Europe.
14:33We thought we had a mega difference, which was that our product was better.
14:39The whole concept of flame-grilled burgers, and that was supposed to be more healthy for you.
14:44I mean, everyone prefers grilling their burgers to fry in.
14:49When people say fried, you tend to think added oil.
14:53McDonald's burgers are not cooked in added oil.
14:54Burger King understood that in burgers, big was always better, and in 1957 introduced its greatest creation.
15:04The Whopper. I've got everything in it. It smells absolutely great. Here we go.
15:09You can't beat it. I like the flame-grilled nature, which is clearly different from what the other burger chains do.
15:23It's a perfectly balanced burger. It's a Big Mac, slightly taller and smaller in diameter.
15:30But I love the sauces, the vegetables, the tomato or tomato, the lettuce, the pickles.
15:38And I remember in my Burger King training putting them all together.
15:42And I think the sesame seed is somewhat different as well.
15:47Can I have another go?
15:48I have had a Whopper before, but not for a long, long time.
16:04It's been a gristle.
16:09Burger King's whole strategy was focus on the flame-grilled burgers with this great sandwich, the Whopper,
16:16and the fact that you could have it anyway.
16:20But that is the iconic difference between McDonald's, where you basically got it as is,
16:26and Burger King, where you could, say, hold the sauce, hold the lettuce, hold the tomato, or for the Brits, tomato.
16:35I still maintain the Whopper is the best sandwich out there today.
16:38Confident in its superior product, Burger King had come to Britain, ready to take on rivals, old and new.
16:46People would have been familiar with Wimpy, which is the more established chain in the UK.
16:52And then McDonald's.
16:55And then Burger King was this big, brash, colourful, because that was the logo.
17:01Upstart coming in.
17:03People were really kind of excited about America, Hollywood.
17:08There's a certain authenticity with these American brands.
17:11Burger King opened stores in famous locations to get themselves noticed.
17:19They'd taken on all these very expensive, which means uneconomic, high-profile locations in places like Leicester Square.
17:28And making things big was certainly part of the game.
17:30Despite all these high-profile launches, Burger King was not making a significant dent in the UK burger market.
17:40In America, Burger King used attack adverts against McDonald's,
17:44like this cheeky ad with an angelic Sarah Michelle Geller.
17:47Do I look 20% smaller to you? I'm nice to McDonald's.
17:53When I order a regular burger at McDonald's, they make it with 20% less meat than Burger King.
18:00Unbelievable!
18:02When you look at the history of Burger King, they were quite successful at being, let's say, avant-garde
18:08and a bit edgy in terms of their advertising.
18:11Burger King tried to take a pop at Ronald through advertising in the UK, but ended up in the British courts.
18:20There was a court case over it. It went something like,
18:23it's not just big, comma, Mac. You'll know when you have a Whopper.
18:28The comma was a bit of a ploy.
18:32The battle of the American burger chains has ended in the High Court with both sides claiming victory.
18:36The judge ruled that the slogan, it's not just Big Mac, used by Burger King was misleading.
18:43McDonald's had claimed that the slogan could lead to people thinking Burger Kings were sold by them.
18:49They also alleged that the slogan was a libel on their Big Mac burgers, but this was rejected by the court.
18:55Burger King made headlines with the case, but the British public didn't go for this American strategy.
19:00The UK was in a very different place. It wasn't the British thing to kind of take the competition on face to face.
19:10McDonald's never did it. We never did the comparative advertising.
19:16I think the British people are, I'll decide if it's good for me. I'll decide if it's big.
19:20You know, it's a customer's decision. It isn't for the company to say ours is bigger or better or this or that.
19:26You're just, it's a customer's decision. And they will decide.
19:32It seems the British public did decide. By 1987, Burger King had only 14 restaurants in Britain.
19:40But that was about to radically change.
19:42Wimpy at the time had two operational methods. One was counter service, the other was table service.
19:55But burgers on plates were no longer fashionable and 150 of Wimpy's original table service restaurants had closed.
20:03To compete in the changing market, they'd bolstered their counter service with 100 new branches.
20:08Counter service was effectively the faster side where you come in, pick up and go.
20:15And Burger King saw that as a real opportunity.
20:19The Grand Metropolitan, owner of Burger King, has acquired all of United Biscuits restaurants, including the Wimpy High Street burger chain.
20:28The deal is worth 180 million pounds and means that Grand Met will have as many burger outlets as McDonald's.
20:34The British appetite for fast food is growing steadily. The total market is worth around 650 million pounds a year.
20:41A quarter of that is spent on traditional fish and chips. But the American chain McDonald's is seen as the leader in the burger market.
20:47Grand Metropolitan, which today bought the Wimpy chain from United Biscuits, is now mounting a determined bid for supremacy under the banner of Burger King.
20:55What Grand Met wanted was the expansion of their burger brand. Their burger brand at the time was Burger King.
21:05They had to convert all of the Wimpy counter service into Burger Kings.
21:10Overnight, the once mighty Wimpy was almost completely wiped off the high street.
21:17When I look back, that was exactly the right move for Burger King. I think we converted over 100. We got up to 170 very quickly.
21:26While Burger King enjoyed a win, McDonald's faced a mighty new battle.
21:33London Greenpeace published a pamphlet, circulated it quite widely, basically saying McDonald's is just about the nastiest thing on earth.
21:43We do this, we do that, we destroy this, we're terrible. I know we're not perfect.
21:48The world's largest fast food business, McDonald's, has begun a libel action at the High Court against two environmental campaigners.
21:57Dave Morris and Helen Steele are accused of claiming that McDonald's products caused ill health and destroyed rainforests.
22:04The pamphlets also accuse McDonald's of links to cancer, worker exploitation and advertising to children.
22:10We have this enormous corporation acting in a sort of appalling manner against people who have raised perfectly legitimate questions.
22:19And I'm just concerned that we have this sort of massive corporation that nobody dares speak out against.
22:25In what became a David versus Goliath battle, the two activists needed help.
22:31A young Keir Starmer stepped in to fight the longest libel case in British court history.
22:36I immediately saw that McDonald's had a very strong legal team and that it was a complicated case raising all sorts of issues.
22:44And as soon as I saw the imbalance, I decided that I would do what I could to help them.
22:51We're prepared to do anything it takes to defend the public's right to criticise multinational corporations.
22:58After seven years of wrangling, the Honourable Mr Justice Bell delivered his judgement of more than a thousand pages.
23:03In it, he ruled that David and Helen had not proved that McDonald's destroyed the rainforest, caused cancer or had bad working conditions.
23:11He did, however, agree that McDonald's had used children's susceptibility to ads to exploit them and that some animal cruelty had taken place under their watch.
23:20We are, as you can imagine, broadly satisfied with the judgement given this morning.
23:24It's my responsibility to protect our reputation and that's exactly what we've done.
23:31Very serious allegations were made about our company. They were proven to be false.
23:37I resented, as we talked about in that Green McLibel London Greenpeace thing, I resented being portrayed as something evil from the moment I got up till I went to bed.
23:50I resented it. Hence, I had to fight it.
23:53While McDonald's were in court, Burger King were exploring new ways to take the top spot, places where no one can escape.
24:03People tend to be stuck in locations like motorway service stations and airports or train stations.
24:10Not a lot of choice. So, there's a way of getting the brand in front of people.
24:14It effectively forces people to sample. If you go on a motorway, you see the pole sign, as it's called, a long way away.
24:25So, that's the first time you see, see the Burger King stuck in the air.
24:29And then, if you go in the service station, you see it again.
24:33So, it's multiple impressions and then people start sampling the food, maybe for the first time.
24:40McDonald's started to feel a pinch in growth.
24:45They looked to the advertising magicians at Leo Burnett for a solution.
24:52We're going to give you a sneak preview of my Happy Meal collection.
25:00Pretty much every Happy Meal since 1987.
25:04This is David Kisielewski.
25:09Esmeralda.
25:11He was behind some of McDonald's most iconic British advertising campaigns.
25:17In 89, 90, 91, what had been a consistent growth curve in sales for McDonald's in the UK started to flatten out.
25:27And McDonald's has always been an organization that has been very focused on sales.
25:35And they were concerned about this.
25:38When we asked a focus group to imagine that they were at a party and that everyone at the party was a brand.
25:45So, you had a Mr. McDonald's, a Mr. Burger King, a Mr. KFC.
25:51If you bump into Mr. McDonald's, what's he like?
25:54How would you describe him?
25:56And one person likened McDonald's to a brash, arrogant, ugly American in a loud suit.
26:04McDonald's wanted to change that.
26:06Pretty much every commercial prior to us coming on board was set in a restaurant.
26:13I mean, that was almost sacrosanct.
26:16We took it out of the restaurant and we started to take it into people's lives.
26:20What about these?
26:21I like them if you like them.
26:23What's wrong with you?
26:24Nothing, I'm just hungry, that's all.
26:25Iconic British director Ken Loach was hired to direct a game-changing ad for McDonald's.
26:32I love it, really.
26:34He's driving me, man.
26:39We focused very much on trying to build an emotional connection with the British public.
26:47Just as McDonald's were riding high, a crisis was about to hit Britain that could put an end to the whole burger industry.
26:55An urgent inquiry is to be carried out into BSE or mad cow disease.
27:03In the early days of the BSE outbreak, Agriculture Minister John Gummer tried to keep confidence in British beef high by publicly feeding his daughter a beef burger.
27:14It was a little hot for her.
27:17Hot!
27:18But by 1996, the outbreak had become a national crisis and it would take a lot more for the public to feel safe.
27:25The bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, mad cow disease, it had been around for a while in varying degrees.
27:35There was just an explosion of mad cow disease, British beef bad, we may have to slaughter 11 million cattle, all sorts of things.
27:44I mean, just all heck broke loose.
27:48This latest panic is bound to hit beef sales.
27:51I was worried, unquestionably.
27:54I said to myself, we better convene a few people and talk. What's our next step? What are we going to do?
28:00We had a crisis meeting at the head office. Everyone, all the sort of senior management were there and the head of PR.
28:09After several hours of conversation, it was decided we were going to take beef off the menu.
28:15British beef was a concern. While the burger chain scrambled to find new sources for their supply chains, anything containing beef was pulled.
28:24It was the right thing to do. Just say, oh my goodness, how much beef did you throw away? Well, it was a lot, it was a lot. And I would do it again tomorrow.
28:33McDonald's was in a very strong position because everyone else followed. Burger King followed, everyone followed.
28:41They knew if they couldn't retain the trust of their customers, there was not going to be a business left.
28:47The major brands raced to push non-beef items like chicken burgers, nuggets and veggie burgers to keep sales coming.
28:56Transparency is a good thing. Open, honest, you know, you give them the good, you give them the bad, you lay it all out, but you got to be honest.
29:06While beef rejoined the menu after several stressful days,
29:10consumer anxiety saw McDonald's continue to offer and expand the alternatives for the next 10 years.
29:18But throughout the crisis, McDonald's had shown that rapid responses and adaptability could keep them riding high.
29:25Then in 1999, Britain had a new favourite food, curry.
29:30McDonald's quickly embraced the trend with new non-beef burgers.
29:33That year they launched an ad, a none too subtle stereotypical pastiche of questionable tastes, promoting the new range in mimicked low-budget cinema ads for local curry houses.
29:46Our specialities include the lamb McSpicy for £1.39, the McChicken Cormannan.
29:52The 1990s saw rapid growth for both Burger King and McDonald's.
29:56They survived endless obstacles, but a new dawn was breaking that would shake their fries.
30:04Can I take a photo of you guys?
30:07Oh, look, another day at home, normal.
30:10As we approached the new millennium, a cultural shift and food revolution was about to make an impact.
30:17I'm Peter Gordon.
30:18Known as the godfather of fusion cuisine, Kiwi chef Peter Gordon transformed British menus.
30:23People would come to the sugar club and have tamarind flavoured ice cream and luxo with quail's eggs.
30:31Foodies were in and we all wanted flavour without fuss.
30:35Cooking's gotta be a laugh.
30:37It's gotta be simple, it's gotta be tasty.
30:39Britain had been going through this sort of evolution of some cool food.
30:44There was a bit of pride in British cooking.
30:47Burgers, I think, were seen as cheap.
30:51They hadn't gone through this sort of transformation of it can be a funky thing, you know.
30:56GBK was like a restaurant rather than a McDonald's takeaway.
31:01You feel like you were going out for a night, having a bit of a treat, you know, meet up with your mates.
31:05I felt that there was a space for something, an innovation to come in that would be a bit of a game changer.
31:14I'm gonna do a beef burger with a bit of hummus.
31:19I've got this beautiful rib eye here that I'm gonna mix in amongst the mint.
31:23Because I want to also have a bit of textural contrast in here.
31:28Gourmet Burger Kitchen landed in 2001 and it would open our eyes to a very different kind of burger.
31:36What we wanted to do was create something where the provenance of the meat had to be important.
31:43People were still really nervous with beef.
31:46And then we were thinking, let's open our burger joint, you know, it's gonna be really good.
31:49Peter created GBK's signature burger style with an obsessive eye for detail.
31:54We began the process of the patty by mixing them ourselves.
32:00And there was sort of a belief amongst us that there should be a bit of shin and there should be a bit of chuck.
32:06Because they all have different textures. How fine they should be minced, how coarse they should be minced.
32:10I also want to have a patty that's a bit bigger. I want it nice and pink in the middle.
32:15If we're gonna farm animals and kill them, at least give them the dignity that they had a good life.
32:19Don't turn them into some dry bit of brown cardboard.
32:23Do you season a patty before you cook it? You know, do you put salt in the mix?
32:30And I soon realised that if we put the salt in too soon, if we put any salt in in fact, it changes the structure and the flavour of the meat.
32:38And it just dries it out eventually. So we got rid of the salt.
32:41Peter created a style of burger that was like nothing else on the British High Street.
32:46It felt innovative, I think because we'd looked at the burger from the patty to the bun and everything in between.
32:55And we wanted to create something that didn't exist at the time.
32:59Like it is hard to imagine that these things were novel, but they really were.
33:04This feels nice and beefy, which is good.
33:06In fast food burgers, I think the thing that's missing is the flavour of beef.
33:10There. Then I'm going to put my bread in the pan.
33:16Oops.
33:20Oh no, that'll set the whole building off.
33:26When we were creating the burgers we began to think, is there a science to the layers?
33:31And we ended up pretty much having the bun, a bit of chutney, lettuce and tomato, the meat on top of that, the cheese always on top of the meat.
33:40And then the other bits and garnishes.
33:42That was the one that we just found most satisfying.
33:44There were moments when it did feel like there was a rock concert and Robbie Williams was about to play and there were these queues out the door.
33:52And people would queue.
33:54A bit of hummus.
33:56A little bit of that.
34:00The ultimate burger.
34:04GBK was probably the one thing that changed the shape of British burgers.
34:09The two burger titans, McDonald's and Burger King, weren't initially worried about these new-fangled gourmet burgers, but they were about to come under fire elsewhere.
34:20The food industry underwent trial by media as the popularity of burgers wreaked havoc on our waistlines.
34:27Walk along any high street in Britain and if you're feeling peckish there's certainly no shortage of temptation.
34:34But the fact is, almost one in five of us is now clinically obese in the UK.
34:40And the number of children who are overweight has almost doubled in a decade.
34:45Just as this obesity crisis was worrying the fast food chains, a hugely influential movie came out charting the impact of eating nothing but McDonald's food for a month.
34:56What I'm showing in the film is over a long period of eating a high-fat, high-sugar, you know, over-consuming, under-exercising diet, this is what can happen to you.
35:06There's no question McDonald's food has calories.
35:09McDonald's can fit very, very happily into a well-balanced diet stroke lifestyle.
35:14McDonald's was not something people ate 21 meals a week.
35:19It is simply not true.
35:21Going on, we provided dietary information, calorie content.
35:26They thought that they'd found the silver bullet with salads.
35:31Now, you know, people don't go to McDonald's for salads.
35:35And people don't go to McDonald's to worship their bodies like a temple either.
35:40Maybe me, I could lose a pound or two, but there you go.
35:43But the obesity backlash couldn't slow Britain's love of this juicy, delicious snack, and more competition filled up the high streets.
35:54Burger King looked for a new way to take a bite out of their biggest rival.
35:58After 20 years at McDonald's, David left and joined Team Burger King.
36:04I like the idea of sort of doing the whole poacher turned gamekeeper thing.
36:09I wanted something new, so I jumped at it.
36:12What we wanted to do was to develop and launch a product that would force the British public to rethink their perceptions of Burger King.
36:23That Burger King was just a sort of second-rate version of McDonald's and quite a lot more expensive to boot.
36:32To get ahead in the gourmet game, Burger King launched their own high-end burger with a campaign that played on the preconceptions of cheap food.
36:39I'll take that new Angus Burger, please.
36:43Uh, Colin?
36:45Is Block once an Angus Burger?
36:51An Angus Burger? Is he crazy?
36:59100% flame-grilled, certified Aberdeen Angus beef.
37:03It flew off the shelves.
37:05The turnaround plan was a success.
37:06Fancy new burgers weren't the only trick up David's sleeve.
37:11He drove a cheeky new campaign to get Burger King back in the spotlight.
37:15True to the old adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity,
37:22that actually served to reinforce this reputation that we were seeking to project,
37:29of being a little bit edgy, a little bit disruptive and a little bit out there.
37:36But just as Burger King thought they had seen off the new-fangled upstart,
37:41they were about to find out that in the land of burgers, small was going to be beautiful.
37:46In 2008, entrepreneur Scott Collins and street food pioneer Yanni Papoutsis brought something new to the British public.
38:00People think it's meat liquor as in licking.
38:05Um, it's a stupid name. We're stuck with it.
38:08I believe we were the first people to do smash burgers in the UK.
38:11You just have a ball of meat and you just squash it onto a very, very hot flat top grill.
38:19And you literally force it down to get a greater surface area because then you get more,
38:26more of the meat has the Maillard reaction, which caramelises all the protein and sugar in it,
38:30which is what the browning, which gives burgers their flavour.
38:32If you've got the meat split into two patties, you're getting double the amount of browning,
38:39which is double the amount of flavour.
38:41The meat itself is like the speakers of a sound system.
38:45The amount of fat you put in is like the quality of an amp and it just amplifies the flavour.
38:50Can you tell me a little bit more about the kind of fat ratio? What are those percentages?
38:54I'm not telling you.
38:56Every member of staff has to sign an NDA.
38:58Our names and various dishes are trademarked and copyrighted,
39:02which cost a fortune because you just get ripped off left, right and centre.
39:07They took something American and traditional and gave it a cool British flavour.
39:14It kind of just steamrolled. It was then social media was really hitting Twitter.
39:18Food was becoming more popular than ever.
39:21And it just sort of hit that zenith where, or tipping point,
39:25where everybody was suddenly interested in food.
39:28It set social media on fire and made the burger joint a place to be seen.
39:36I got on the train up to London and went to Meat Liquor.
39:40I'd seen everything on Twitter about Yanni and the meat wagon and he was, you know,
39:45putting a tweet out and he was sitting in a car park for two hours and 300 people would come down and queue up.
39:50And this kind of amazing atmosphere was brewing.
39:55The new burger bandwagon gathered pace and two more newcomers jumped on, Tom Barton and Phil Eales.
40:01A lot of burgers, particularly the American-influenced kind of burgers, it's all about the sauces and the cheese and the crazy toppings and the amount you can ram on top.
40:09We thought actually there's a British angle here. The sort of burger you get at a farmer's market. Thick and classic British flavours.
40:18We were super clear from the start, the kind of style we wanted. We wanted a thick patty, you know, a puck patty.
40:24We wanted to kind of eat like a steak. The puck is just a, you know, like a hockey puck.
40:28It's a thicker set burger which is going to eat differently.
40:31So the other big thing that we do with our patty is we chop it, we don't actually mince it. Medium is standard in our restaurants but we'll go down to medium rare.
40:41Honest Burgers opened in Brixton Market in 2011.
40:46We didn't try to be cool. We're not cool people.
40:49Our expectations were very low, you know, two lads in Brighton, no one's ever heard of us, it's in the middle of Brixton Market, no one's going to come.
40:54And then I remember within about four weeks I was telling people it was two hours for a table.
41:00On like a Tuesday night. And, you know, and they'd be like, yeah, alright.
41:05And I'd be like, what? Like, I just said two hours for a burger and they're like, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
41:10Today we could spend probably a million pounds on marketing and we still wouldn't get the exposure that we got for free in that first year in Brixton.
41:17So I'm irrationally in love with this thing.
41:22Three, two, one! And go!
41:34Burgers have become an obsession. They even have their own awards.
41:39There's a lot more competition, all different styles of burgers.
41:43They're classic L.A. smash burgers with lacy edges.
41:47They're kind of gooey, steamy, cheesy, messy ones.
41:50I love burgers. Can you not tell I've got a burger tattoo on my arm?
41:55The big brands might not be able to keep up with the cool appeal of the newcomers, but they continue to evolve and stay ahead in this very British burger market.
42:06Coming out on top is McDonald's, turning over £1.5 billion a year.
42:12The reason that McDonald's has run away with the market share is over time they've had more consistent management, more consistent operations.
42:23May not be as good a product in my view, but they've had more consistent product.
42:28But the biggest difference is they've got this huge marketing budget.
42:31It's very different today than it was nearly 50 years ago now, but I think change for mostly good reasons.
42:40I remember McDonald's as a kid was orange and red and a big clown and then suddenly by the time I was 18 it was kind of green and doing coffee.
42:47It's incredibly skillful to pull it off.
42:51Our insatiable love of the burger means more and more brands are nudging their way onto the high street.
43:00Is Wimpy a survivor?
43:01Wimpy's definitely a survivor.
43:03With 68 restaurants and plans for expansion, the once mighty Wimpy empire still stands after 70 years on the British high street.
43:15So these are drawings for new restaurants.
43:19We knew we had to make a change to keep the brand relevant.
43:23We've definitely seen new customers or lapsed customers come back through our door.
43:28They may not have been in for X number of years, but they give us a try.
43:35Hello, Chris.
43:37How are you?
43:39We're using more booth seating, which is kind of that 50s, 60s vibe.
43:44The standout differentiator between the likes of Wimpy and some of the other well-known high street brands is that we are a table service brand.
43:55I think we all just really root for Wimpy.
43:56It's just one of those brands that elicits that kind of warmth.
44:02Brands will come into the UK market, they'll exit the UK market, it changes.
44:09We're a quintessentially British brand.
44:13I almost feel it's my duty to make sure that Wimpy succeeds.
44:17The British burger has evolved over decades, but while our hunger for beef might be insatiable now, Britons are increasingly turning away from meat, aware of the negative consequences of eating it.
44:34One example is the impact of the industry on the environment, and the battle of the future could be about more sustainable burgers.
44:42Cattle ranching is the single biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon.
44:48Burger King has announced it will adapt 50% of its products to be vegan by 2030, and McDonald's are launching their own new products, responding to new consumer trends.
45:00We've been trying to work on how we can tackle sustainability.
45:06So we launched something called Honest Farming, which is exactly that.
45:10It's us tackling our sustainability, it's us growing a brand new supply chain in this country, working direct with farmers and incentivizing them to farm in a way that we feel is beneficial to the landscapes they're farming on.
45:26I'm not saying it's the solution for the world. We all need to eat less meat, but for our business, we think that it's a very good solution.
45:35A few years ago, we didn't serve anything vegan on our menu, and we started looking into plant-based meat, and we actually launched the Beyond Meat burger in the UK.
45:45The American brand that came over, they were the first to kind of launch a plant-based burger.
45:49We were literally getting people calling up, saying, hey, I'm just driving up from Bournemouth, can you reserve me one? This really is a thing.
45:56The rise of veganism, it still only accounts for a very small percentage of our business, so of course we've got both eyes on it, and we're embracing it, but it's going to be a long time before that's a major share of our market.
46:12It's evolving constantly. We're fascinated by it.
46:16It's blissful straight after that.
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