McDonald’s France Finally Goes Vegan, Offering Veggie McPlant Nuggets With Beyond Chicken

McDonald’s France is introducing vegan nuggets made from Beyond Meat, its first plant-based option, offered at the same price as conventional chicken.

Fast-food giant McDonald’s is finally offering a plant-based option in France, its biggest market outside the US.

The chain will launch Veggie McPlant Nuggets tomorrow at all its 1,500+ outlets in the country, extending its Europe-wide partnership with US vegan leader Beyond Meat. They will be available in four-, six-, nine- and 20-piece servings and as part of various meal deals, all at the same price as conventional McNuggets.

Unlike previous veggie launches, the vegan chicken nuggets are a permanent menu addition at McDonald’s France, and are designed to attract vegans as well as flexitarians looking to diversify their protein intake.

McDonald’s looks to build on France’s changing dietary habits

The vegan McNuggets are a result of a “close collaboration between Beyond Meat and McDonald’s”. They’re made from a base of pea protein and coated in a blend of wheat and corn flours lightly salted with pepper and celery.

“We chose to innovate with a first offering based on plant proteins, directly inspired by one of our iconic products,” said McDonald’s France CMO Jean-Guillaume Bertola. “With the Veggie McPlant Nuggets, we are responding to the increasing desire of French consumers to diversify their protein intake while never compromising on taste.”

The national rollout was based on consumer tests conducted by McDonald’s, which “yielded very satisfactory results, particularly regarding quality and flavour”, according to Bertola.

“The response was unanimous, there was a real craze from our consumers who found a strong resemblance to the iconic nugget,” he told Le Figaro. “We are rather confident about the success of the product,” he added, noting that the meat-free nuggets have “performed very well” in Germany since their early 2023 launch there.

McDonald’s holds the largest share of France’s increasingly popular fast-food market. In fact, the country has been labelled as the chain’s biggest market after the US. So the launch of a vegan version of one of its most popular products is a marker of the country’s changing dietary habits, and McDonald’s wish to capitalise on the transition.

In 2023, an EU-wide survey revealed that nearly six in 10 consumers in France had reduced their meat intake in the preceding year. And federal data shows that French people are eating 6% less meat per capita than they did 20 years ago, though overall consumption has still risen.

Currently, its citizens eat over 700g of meat per week, more than double what’s recommended in Eat-Lancet’s Planetary Health Diet, and 100g higher than the national dietary guidelines. Health and climate experts have been calling for the national recommendations to cut weekly meat consumption by 25% to 450g in the upcoming update.

And despite the high amounts of meat the French eat, 57% of them say they’d back government policies that cut back on animal protein for human and planetary health.

Beyond Meat’s European success with McDonald’s

The launch of the Veggie McPlant Nuggets marks an extension of the successful partnership between McDonald’s and Beyond Meat in Europe. While the McPlant burger – made using Beyond Beef – hasn’t quite worked out in the US, it has thrived across the Atlantic.

Beyond Meat has suffered a rocky couple of years in terms of sales – for example, it posted an 18% decrease in annual revenue in 2023. Despite that, international sales actually grew by the same percentage, largely thanks to the McDonald’s partnership.

The vegan meat maker’s CEO, Ethan Brown, told investors that the business had witnessed “continued traction at McDonald’s across countries such as Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, UK, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Switzerland”.

With the vegan McNuggets, Beyond Meat’s link-up with McDonald’s is entering France, joining a Veggie lineup comprising burgers such as the McVeggie, Veggie Curry, and Honey Mustard Veggie, as well as the Caesar Salad Veggie. But none of these existing options are suitable for vegans, so the plant-based nuggets are a first for the fast-food chain’s French operation.

This comes amid a resurgent plant-based industry in the country. Just last week, the EU’s top court ruled against a ban on the use of meat-related words on plant-based packaging, a piece of legislation originally proposed by the French government (which was suspended by the nation’s highest administrative court).

This came at the same time France’s most popular plant-based meat export, La Vie, closed a €25M funding round, introduced vegan meatballs, and debuted its first national TV ad. And months earlier, despite all the kerfuffle, plant-based food was all the rage at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.