Former derivatives trader aims to conquer the fast-food industry with a vegan burger that looks like a Big Mac

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Before the pandemic came along and spoiled the fun, it didn’t get much better for meat lovers than London Ribfest. The annual summer festival would draw tens of thousands of carnivores to the university town in southwestern Ontario, where one and all happily stuffed themselves silly.

Barbecue rib outfits, with juicy-sounding names such as Fat Boys, Boss Hog’s, Ribs Royale and Smoke House Bandits, cranked out rack after rack of the good stuff in a veritable boneyard of excess geared to please an audience of meat lovers, as well as any curious folks who just happened to pass by.

But most curious of all at the 2016 event was the Globally Local food booth. Set a safe distance from the so-called “ribbers,” Globally Local served up what it called a “Big MACinnes,” a vegan burger, consisting of two chickpea patties slathered in special sauce on a sesame seed bun, that bore an uncanny and utterly intentional resemblance to a certain well-known burger.

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We were literally poking the bear in the eye when we showed up at Ribfest

James McInnes

“We were literally poking the bear in the eye when we showed up at Ribfest,” James McInnes, the burger’s creator, said on a recent April afternoon. “The rib people were like, ‘What the hell, this is outrageous.’”

Even more audacious, perhaps, is where McInnes’ company, Globally Local Technologies Inc., finds itself today, on the cusp of a major, multi-million-dollar expansion that will take a food fight to the likes of McDonald’s despite being in a pandemic that has brutalized a sizeable percentage of the restaurant industry.

Currently, Globally Local has two vegan fast-food restaurants — one in London and Toronto — but the company recently listed on the TSX Venture Exchange and plans are afoot to open 20 additional vegan joints across North America over the next 12 months.

McInnes is brimming with confidence, and not without reason. The global market for vegan food could be worth more than US$30 billion by 2026, according to a report by Allied Analytics LLP, a research firm based in Portland, Ore., and meat substitutes will account for US$8.1 billion of that, up from about US$4.5 billion in 2018.

McInnes and his co-founder/spouse, Vasiliki, are betting that vegans and non-vegans alike with a hankering for a quick, plant-based fix will, in theory, be more inclined to walk into a vegan fast-food establishment to satisfy their craving than a Burger King or McDonald’s with a meat alternative on a menu mostly built upon meat.

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“Other fast-food chains are definitely our competitors,” McInnes said. “We, however, offer a complete vegan fast-food experience, which is very difficult for other chains to replicate.”

A burger joint is still a burger joint, to be sure, no matter how many salads and healthier options they have for sale. Globally Local’s positioning as a wholly vegan fast-food emporium is part of what makes the company intriguing, said Joel Baum, professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

“The last half-dozen years or so there has been a real shift, and Globally Local doesn’t quite fit into it, which is interesting,” he said.

The shift Baum is referring to is the rise of plant-based food-tech companies, such as Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc., which have tinkered around with science to create non-meat burgers that taste passably good and, at least in the case of the Impossible Burger, sizzle and bleed. The intent is to provide all the sizzle of actual meat, without actually being meat.

But Globally Local isn’t trying to fool anybody and its products aren’t trying to be meat. Its message, rather, is straightforward: It sells vegan fare. It offers fast, tasty food that is equivalent in price but not quite as unhealthy as traditional fast food, so why not give it a whirl?

“They are not making a play like the Beyond Meat burger, where you are supposed to be thinking you are eating a hamburger,” Baum said.

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Sadly, for foodies with a fondness for word play and poking fun at behemoth corporations, the Big MACinnes attracted a big, scary cease-and-desist letter from McDonald’s legal department. It has since been renamed the Famous Burger. Other less famous Globally Local menu options include the Vopper and the Crispy Chickun.

McInnes creates the recipes himself, while Vasiliki and their five-year-old son, Georgie, taste them. As all parents know, there is no harsher food critic than a five-year-old child.

And, just in case you were wondering, the chef isn’t a preachy, wild-eyed, my-way-or-the-highway vegan. Indeed, converting to plant-based eating did not feature on McInnes’ life agenda after he graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a genetics degree and took a job as a derivatives trader with Refco Inc.

Remember Refco? The New York-based financial services company notoriously blew up in 2005 after it was revealed that the CEO was cooking the books.

“It was pretty crazy,” McInnes said. “We were just sitting there one day in the Montreal office and you see on TV – “Refco declares bankruptcy” — and we were all like, ‘What do we do now? Do we walk out with the monitors?’”

Instead, the now 41-year-old, along with a couple other partners, founded Cyborg Trading Systems, a Kitchener, Ont.-based financial technology company. They attracted some investors, grew the business to 30 employees and even opened an office in New York before it all went to pot, particularly for McInnes, who was ousted as chief executive as part of an investors’ coup. (The company no longer exists).

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“I am not blaming anybody, but it just didn’t end well — for anybody,” he said.

The experience left McInnes with a bitter taste. But he had other, more pressing concerns, including being diagnosed with high blood pressure at age 32.

He had never thought much about the food he consumed beyond thinking how much he enjoyed it: steaks, steak sandwiches, hamburgers, chicken and pork — and always plenty of vegetables — washed down with a glass of milk.

The doctor’s report spooked him enough that he decided to adopt a vegan diet for a month, just to see if it would lower his blood pressure. Lo and behold, it did, so he stuck with the plant-based program.

“I would have never thought I’d become a vegan,” McInnes said.

A year later, he met Vasiliki at a friend’s wedding, and in 2014 he founded Globally Local as a food-market service, delivering organic produce to Londoners’ doorsteps. Then Ribfest happened and a star vegan burger was born.

“I remember being half-afraid that the rib people were going to start throwing bones at us,” he said with a chuckle.

Planning to expand from two to more than 20 restaurants in a pandemic is no laughing matter

But planning to expand from two to more than 20 restaurants in a pandemic is no laughing matter. Not when more than 10,000 Canadian restaurants have reportedly gone out of business since March 2020. Yet as battered as the industry as a whole has been over the past 13 months, the fast-food sector has, to a degree, proved almost pandemic proof.

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“It is the lowest common denominator,” McInnes said.

What he means is: fast food is the cheapest food, and when people need a fix, cheap sells.

McDonald’s is a case in point. Global year-over-year revenues at the fast-food giant declined 10 per cent to US$19.2 billion in 2020, but even when faced with the worst economic crisis the world has ever seen, people didn’t stop buying Big Macs.

And McInnes is convinced they will also buy into Globally Local’s wholly vegan fast-food model. In the meantime, he has been keeping busy in the kitchen to prepare for the anticipated rush by creating a vegan fish burger.

“I am not sure what we are going to call it yet,” he said, before inspiration took hold. “How about, the Filet, No Fish? We’ll see what McDonald’s has to say about that.”

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