“Here, the bread is toasted. We put on top smoked Swedish bacon with apple wood. And we have beef, 100% Swedish...”: hamburgers such as prepares Erfan, manager of a restaurant Max in Stockholm, are 10% more expensive than those of McDonald’s, but they please. And the recipe is simple: local and “climate positive”.
The Swedish chain, which has made the fight against climate change a priority, indeed offers hamburgers with ground beef, but above all, prepare half of their menus with alternatives, based on chicken, cheese, or vegetable substitute, much less emitting greenhouse gases.
And it works: Max is going to open his 187th establishment at the start of the school year, in the center of Stockholm, where McDonald’s had inaugurated Sweden’s first fast-food restaurant in 1973. And the chain is even buying up its competitor’s former restaurants, to settle there.
For the CEO of Max, Richard Begfors, it is an economic war, but also an ideological one: “My mission is to try to save the world from McDonald’s. We have seen that 70% of our carbon footprint comes from beef. So half of what we sell today is something other than red meat. It’s quite unique in the fast food industry.“
Today, Max has reached 400 million in turnover and has developed in Norway, Denmark, Poland, even in Egypt. Nothing to worry the American giant, however, which, through the voice of its press service, recalls that it remains “the leader in Sweden, with 200 restaurants and sales that reached 600 million in 2021.” But Richard Begfors has a surprise in store for them, by 2030: he intends to reach a billion in turnover, and, above all, to knock McDonald’s off its Swedish pedestal. What already say to the channel on its website: “We’re going to be the best burger chain in the world.“