The World's Largest Vegan Burger Weighs in at Over 358 Pounds

The world's appetite for veggie burgers has undeniably grown in recent years. Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger engaged ina plant-based burger arms race。看到新兴市场,大量的其他品牌jumped in on the action。And slowly, seemingly every major burger chain rolled out a vegetarian option, most recentlyculminating with McDonald's。

But while some may wonder if the world's hunger for plant-based burgers may be satiated, a company in Northern Ireland took a stab at filling the biggest vegan appetite yet by setting theGuinness World Recordfor largest vegan burger.

The record-breaking 358-pound, 4-ounce burger, measuring just short of 4 feet in diameter, came courtesy of Finnebrogue Artisan, a family-owned U.K. food producer that bills itself as having "made our name producing premium sausages, venison, bacon, ham, wagyu beef, and plant-based products." Their veggie items, specifically, sell at major British retailers like Tesco and Waitrose.

The record-setting vegan burger wasofficially certified by Guinness World Recordsas being made on November 18 the Finnebrogue CGR site in Downpatrick and utilizing the same recipe as the brand's Naked Evolution Burger, though the results were 1,274 times the size. Ten employees worked on the patty, which took nine hours to cook. And, of course, a patty doth not a "burger" make, so it was also topped with 22 pounds of tomatoes, 10 pounds of lettuce, over 15 pounds of vegan cheese, nearly 4.5 pounds of onions, 11 pounds of gherkins, 11 pounds of the company's vegan Naked Without the Oink bacon, and 11 pounds of Naked Burger sauce before being shoved between a vegan bun,according toThe Irish Post。

"All ingredients had to be verified as vegan," Anthea McAuley, Finnebrogue's communications manager, told the paper. "[We] worked with local bakery, Irwin's, to create a vegan bread bun."

"We were set a target weight of 100 kilograms [220 pounds], but we knew from the outset we wanted to exceed that," Sean Kearney, the company's innovation process manager, added. "The team included representatives from NPD, marketing and engineering; and together we designed and built everything, including a swing to aid turning the patty during cooking. That was perhaps the most challenging part of the record as we didn't want to break the patty."

And what happened to the burger? McAuley explained, "To avoid food waste on the day, which is in line with our own policies and that of the Guinness World Records, we donated some finished burger to homeless charity, The Simon Community. Our staff also enjoyed the burger for their lunch."

Though getting all of the burger in one bite couldn't have been easy: The width from top bun to bottom bun was a bit wider than a human head.