By Daniel Kline TheStreet
"You don't win friends with salad."
That was a song famously sung by Bart, Homer, and Marge Simpson after Lisa Simpson became a vegetarian. It was sung in regards to the menu of a barbecue Homer was throwing, but it's a fair line when you consider what people want from fast-food burger chains.
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People visit McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's because they want indulgent comfort food. People may order healthier choices if they're even offered, but that generally only happens when the person making the healthier choice isn't the one who made the choice of where to eat.
McDonald's has embraced this idea and no longer even pretends. It has dropped salads from its menu and quickly dropped the McPlant, plant-based burger after nobody bought it.
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Burger King has kept its plant-based Impossible Whopper on the menu, but it certainly has not widely embraced healthier menu items. Wendy's does have seasonal salads, but its core menu leans heavily on items with the word "Baconator" in the name.
These chains don't offer healthy options because no matter what they say, consumers don't actually want them.
Celebrity restaurants usually fail
Celebrities have a fairly terrible track record when it comes to opening restaurants. In general, adding a famous person to a restaurant group gets some initial publicity and then the quality of the food and/or the demand level for it decides whether or not a chain is successful.
Mark Wahlberg might be famous enough to get you to eat a Wahlburgers, but it's his non-famous brothers' menu that has actually made the chain successful.
Non-chef celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Flavor Flav, Hulk Hogan, Steven Spielberg, Jessica Alba, and Kevin Costner (a pretty diverse group of famous people) have all failed with restaurants. It's simply a very challenging space where name recognition can make people come once, but it can't make them come back.
Bankruptcies:
- Popular restaurant and bar chain files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
- Popular athletic shoe chain files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
- Award-winning cosmetics brand files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
In addition, celebrities are often wrong when it comes to gauging what regular people want to eat. That's at least partially why a burger chain supported by Formula 1 legend Lewis Hamilton and actor Leonardo DiCaprio was probably doomed from the start.
Burger chain tried to go healthy
Neat Burger was a flawed concept from the beginning. Its founders assumed that there's a large audience of people who want healthier hamburgers.
"Cooking from scratch, we're creating flavour with local and seasonal vegetables: pickling, spicing, seasoning and slow-roasting. We're using protein packed, wholesome ingredients, better for the planet and better for you. It's naturally Neater, and it's our commitment to doing things differently," the company shared on the website for its now-closed New York location.
Neat Burger sold plant-based burgers. It also offered plant-based chicken, salads, and meat-free sandwiches.
The company explained its philosophy on its website.
"Neat represents a new era of eating with brighter, healthier, fresher fast-food. Our mission is to feed a positive change in global eating habits by offering consciously harvested, plant-based food," it posted.
Instead of being comfort food, what people tend to want from a burger chain, it offered preachy food that people may say they want, but history has shown they don't (at least from a fast-food burger chain).
Related: Olive Garden makes major changes customers asked for
Now, Neat Burger has shut down all of its locations in the United Kingdom, which follows the closure of its New York store.
"We have no further comment at this time, other than to confirm that the business has taken the difficult decision to close its UK restaurants.," the company shared.
The chain's sole remaining location in Milan appears to still be open based on its website.
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This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 10:59 AM.
