“Outrageous!”, “Seriously, how do they get away with it?!”, “WTAAAF?” – just some of the responses meal kit brand Gousto was probably hoping for when it launched its ‘The Big Secret’ burger meal last week.
It got… well, not exactly tumbleweed, but not far off. Given the huge waves across the sector made by Joe Wicks’ ‘Killer’ protein bar last year – why only a ripple for Gousto? And is it likely to force the change the company wants?
‘The Big Secret’ meal comprises a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla and strawberry milkshake that looks exactly like any other burger meal you might buy from a fast food outlet.
The difference is Gousto’s meal features what it claimed is “the UK’s most addictive burger” and is “deliberately engineered” to “expose industry tricks”.
The (not such a) Big Secret
So what are those tricks? The fast food industry’s recipes are “designed to drive cravings and overconsumption”, Gousto claims, with the use of “highly targeted ingredients and techniques” to “engineer cravings and keep people coming back for more, without them ever realising”.
But it never gets as far as detailing exactly what those shady methods are or how they work, beyond there being a “precise mix of sugar, salt, and fat” that prompts a “bliss point” in scoffers. So far, so vague.
The meal, it says, contains 165% of the recommended daily intake of salt, over triple the daily sugar limit and extremely high levels of saturated fat, delivering more than 2,100 calories, with most components qualifying as ultra-processed. It’s not great, but it’s also not particularly surprising.
Is that really what the fast food giants are up to? It’s a fair question, but consumers aren’t really much wiser off following Gousto’s campaign. And the company – to the detriment of its mission – shies away from directly calling out the worst of the high street chain meals.
Exposing just how much of a customer’s RDA is used up in a single sitting at their local burger bar would surely have generated a far more fevered response. Calling them out for squirreling away these numbers on websites and in the depths of kiosk drop-down menus would be harder for them to ignore. Where Wicks called out the UPF-ridden rivals of his intentionally harmful protein bar by name, Gousto pulls its punches. Naming and shaming would give the campaign far more clout.
While its motives are mostly noble (the subtext is of course that it hopes people will swap a trip to McDonald’s for a Gousto-bought fakeaway) the burger meal stunt proved not quite the impossible to ignore, greasy two-fingers up at the fast food sector the brand was hoping for.
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