Rise and rise of the blue-ribbon burger

The history of Australia's love affair with the hamburger can be told in two landmark moments. In the first, we made it our own: someone, somewhere, whacked on beetroot and a local burger legend was born. The second was far less daring: like the rest of the world, we fell in love with the Big Mac.

For many years, our love affair with the king of fast foods was uncomplicated. Then came the twist in the tale of our appetite for takeaway: the humble hamburger became the food at the centre of a worldwide brawl, one that pitted public health advocates against corporate behemoths - the battle of the bulge versus global chains and their burger-fuelled billions.

It's a fight that's been fiercely waged for a decade. In the nine years since Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me cemented McDonald's as fast-food villain, the industry has indeed changed - at least on the surface. Swamped by bad publicity, the chains made a show of mending their ways - salads appeared on menus; salt content was cut - but their core business remained as it was: flogging fat-laden food to the masses in vast quantities.

But for the first time since the fast-food revolution spread around the world in the 1960s, they haven't had it all their own way. A new breed of competitors has emerged - upstarts who claim to be healthier, more ethically and environmentally sound, cool rather than crass; still clean and quick, but offering quality, not crap. These insurgents claim they're carving out a lucrative place in the market.

Some experts are not convinced it makes much difference. They believe the industry giants, cultural icons above all else, are not for turning, no matter how often they tweak their menus. But the view from below looks promising to those entrepreneurs who've been brave enough to give it a go.

For Mark Koronczyk and his wife Mandy, the road to success as fast-food entrepreneurs began when they met a decade ago in Taiwan, where both were teaching English. They fell in love, and shared eccentric musings - their mutual love of the humble french fry among them. Returning to Australia, they bought a food van and decided to carry on their nomadic life a little longer.

The plan: these two vegetarians would drive around Australia going to music festivals - and they'd support themselves selling upmarket, vegetarian-friendly french fries. That was 2004. Nine years on, the couple presides over the chain Lord of the Fries, which has seven stores and another to come in Melbourne, and a first Sydney store to open in the city centre in a couple of months. It's not just fries, but burgers as well, and nuggets, and onion rings - and it is all vegetarian.

''We thought, what's a vegetarian food that we can serve that isn't being done properly?'' Mark says.

''Fries are the biggest-selling food in the world, actually, and if you do them in a certain way they can be healthy. But most fries are not vegetarian; they're processed in beef tallow. So, we thought, we'll do fresh-cut fries, leave the skins on, and sell them. And being vegetarian, we decided to do the burgers as well - they're soy-based, and a patty is a third of the fat of a meat burger. We use non-animal rennet cheese [and our] sour cream and hot dogs have no gelatine.''

Or as Mandy puts it: ''We skip the extras you get in other places.''

The Koronczyks are among the adventurous brigade who, despairing at the quality and range of fast-food available in Australia and at the hegemony of the global giants such as McDonald's, KFC and Hungry Jack's, decided to take a risk and take the big guys on.

In doing so, they are tapping into what looks like a fast-food revolution driven from below by health-conscious customers, rather than imposed from above as has traditionally been this industry's way of doing business.

With obesity regarded as the No.1 public health enemy of the moment, health campaigners would love to declare this a turning point - the moment public appetite for alternatives meets the willingness of the major chains and some of their risk-taking challengers to change the rules of the game.

It's far from clear that this point has been reached, but the signs are there of an important shift. The story of Simon Crowe, who founded the successful burger chain Grill'd in Melbourne a decade ago, is illustrative: he's shown that an indie burger chain can become more than merely a niche player.

''No one's done anything about scaling up and maintaining their soul,'' Crowe says. ''And why haven't they? It's not impossible, particularly as technology has changed and supply chains have changed.''

Crowe had no food industry background when he launched Grill'd after returning from a posting to the US, where he'd worked in marketing for Foster's. Like the Koronczyks, whimsical thoughts of upending the fat-and-stale fast-food trade in Australia spurred him to roll the dice.

''When I launched back in 2003 there was only [traditional] fast food, so basically all we had to do was position ourselves as different. Now there's a plethora of players …so our job is to make sure we keep evolving and become more recognised for food integrity, for food quality. We want to dial up our service and move to what I'd call 'fresh casual' … or 'premium fast casual'.''

''Premium fast casual'': it's jargon, all right, in an industry full of it - but the players at the other end of the burger market won't have any trouble understanding it. McDonald's, KFC and Hungry Jack's have all invested a lot of time and money over the past decade offering at least the appearance of caring about their customers' health. (Salad with your sundae?)

But facing a threat from the newcomers, whose positioning can only hurt the top three wherever it enforces the perception of them being low-grade, McDonald's Australia chief executive Catriona Noble doesn't skip a beat.

''I love to go and try their food,'' Noble says. ''I think it's quite inspiring. It always brings me back to, 'Who are we and what do we do?' And while we've got healthier options and more variety, our heartland is burgers, so I think places like Grill'd challenge us to say, 'What's our next generation of burger?' People trust us to make good burgers.

''How do we do them at better value and more conveniently? Because that's what we bring to the table. We're very accessible to a lot of people.''

Noble's comments show just how much the fast-food battleground has shifted since McDonald's arrived in Australia in 1971 and laid claim to what for many is a troubling place in the Australian diet.

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, as the saying goes. And an ear worm for life:

Two all-beef patties
Special sauce
Lettuce, cheese
Pickles, onions
On a sesame seed bun

Looking back, it's a wonder beetroot on our burgers ever survived the onslaught.

If youth spares you recognition of the jingle above - and of the memory of having once recited it to the kid on the register in return for a free Coke - it shouldn't take you long to work out what it's about.

Pickles, two beef patties - it is, of course, the Big Mac, a brand that grew so big that 27 years ago The Economist granted it status as a global economic indicator (an estimated 550 million Big Macs are sold in the US alone every year). And in the 1970s and '80s, the ditty above was a tongue-twister that insinuated itself in the Australian popular mind with the efficiency of the theme from The Brady Bunch, an American TV import of almost the same vintage as the Mac.

But junk food and junk TV were, by and large, part of the same package deal. To understand the fast-food industry in Australia - and the genesis of any modern rebellion against the triumph of the American fast-food model - it helps to recognise that before Australia became hooked on fatty American burgers and fries, we had first bought into a cultural brand: the unstoppable American export of its habits and of its most successful exhibition of communal faith, its religion of cleanliness, convenience and speed.

Ask even its small-scale rivals today and you will hear the words uttered by many a parent who has taken their kids to McDonald's. As Mandy Walker Koronczyk, Lord of the Fries co-founder and dedicated vegetarian, says of the chain: ''Their stores are clean, their staff are well trained. There's a lot to be admired.''

It's the business model that has kept McDonald's and KFC at the top of the fast-food chain here for the better part of five decades. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as it was known until the acronym took over in the early 1990s, opened in Australia in 1968. McDonald's made its debut in Yagoona, Sydney, in 1971, and in Glen Waverley, Melbourne, two years later. Today, the chicken chain has more than 600 stores; McDonald's more than 800.

One or other of the fast-food kings is not far away from home for all but the most isolated Australians.

McDonald's in particular has become such a part of the furniture here that on Australia Day the company took the brazen move of rebranding some of its stores Macca's, adopting the established local slang in new signage.

That's the move of a confident company - one assured of its place in the industry and ready to gamble that Australians can embrace it as a local concern, not a relatively small cog in a global corporate wheel. (The only non-American CEO of the company in its history was Australian Charlie Bell, who, like Noble, had worked behind the counter as a teenager. Bell died in 2005, aged 44.)

Noble says the company has a great degree of independence from the American head office, and indeed it is true that many of the McDonald's initiatives on offering healthier options have originated here.

Noting a decision to cut the sugar content in burger buns in Australia, Noble says: ''We tend to do a lot of things differently here in Australia. We have a lot of credibility with our parent company so they tend to let us work around the edges a bit.''

Nonetheless, she acknowledges that in the eyes of many, the company will always have more work to do.

''We probably have a small percentage of people who are absolute haters and they're often the ones who really go after McDonald's, and who use us as the whipping boy. But there is a group in the middle who are more balanced. They're probably ambivalent or a little bit negative but they can actually be attracted to like us a bit more, to come to us a bit more if we offer them the right kind of options.''

For experts on the front line of the obesity war, though, much of what McDonald's has done under the guise of being healthier amounts to window dressing. And as Jane Martin, of the Obesity Policy Coalition, wonders, can the upstart food chains ever really make a dent against such a powerful cultural force? ''I think they'd be a better option but I know they often tend to be more expensive,'' she says. ''They're not as convenient. They don't have the playgrounds, the seniors' menus, the public toilets. But I think often they are healthier.''

Matt Wilkinson, co-owner and chef for Melbourne-based chain Spudbar, is in no doubt that businesses such as his are not only better for customers' health, they are friendlier to the environment - all without hitting the hip-pocket nerve too hard.

Wilkinson is a rare bird in the fast-food business - a fine-dining chef who for the past two years has applied his skills to the other end of the market. He says he joined Spudbar on the condition he could complete its public picture of nutritional value and environmental sustainability. ''Free-range chickens. Free-range pork. I call it 'fair food'. And it was at no extra cost to the consumer. It's just that [the big chains] make bigger margins [by not doing it]. When you have the three big ones, they could easily go for free-range chickens and it would be a better world for it if they did that. They choose not to.''

Professor Steven Allender, who heads the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University, says therein lies the problem: that it doesn't matter much what outlets such as Spudbar or Grill'd or Lord of the Fries do. If big chains refuse to ''reformulate'' their menus for environmental or health reasons, the overall assessment of fast food in Australia - and therefore the prospects for dealing with the obesity crisis - remains poor.

''Kids are eating a lot more fast food. I would suggest reformulation isn't happening fast enough and at the moment it's self-regulated. And that will never be enough for fast food to be[come] healthy.''