McDonald's To Open Its First Veg-Only Restaurants In India

McDonald's, home of the iconic Big Mac, is going vegetarian — at least in India, where 20 to 42 percent of the population eschews meat, depending on how you count.

The company announced that it would open its first vegetarian-only restaurants in the world in India the following year. The first was planned near the Golden Temple, the Sikh pilgrimage site in Amritsar where religious authorities forbid meat at the shrine. After Amritsar, the chain planned another vegetarian outlet at Katra, near the Vaishno Devi cave shrine in Jammu — a revered Hindu pilgrimage site that draws hundreds of thousands of worshippers a year.

"It will be the first time we have opened a vegetarian restaurant in the world," a spokesman for McDonald's in northern India, Rajesh Kumar Maini, told AFP.

The move was less of a leap than it sounds. McDonald's in India already has a menu that is 50 percent vegetarian. It serves no beef, to avoid offending Hindus, and no pork, for Muslim customers. Its McAloo Tikki burger — a spicy fried potato patty at 28 rupees, about 50 US cents — is the top seller in India, accounting for a quarter of total sales. And there is no Big Mac in India at all; the flagship sandwich is the Maharaja Mac, made with chicken.

The company saw the potential for many more vegetarian restaurants across the country. "At the moment, India is still a very small market — we just have 271 restaurants in India, and across the world, we have nearly 33,000," Maini said. Half a million customers a day in India, out of 50 million served daily in more than 100 countries.

It is a textbook case of "think global, act local" — a chain famous for beef hamburgers tailoring itself to a market where the cow is sacred, the pilgrim is vegetarian, and the potato patty outsells everything else.