The Burger Boom

This Week In Ag #167

Thursday is National Hamburger Day! It’s a fitting way to close out National Beef Month.

Americans consume over 50 billion burgers a year. How many is that? If you lined these sandwiches up bun-to-bun, they’d circle the Earth 32 times.

The origin of America’s favorite food is a bit sketchy, with multiple entities claiming invention (sounds like hybrid seed corn). A popular belief is that the concept of cooking seasoned ground beef originated in Hamburg, Germany – hence the name. But that meal was eaten with a fork and knife.

The modern-day hamburger was introduced to the masses and rose to fame at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis. Due to the fast-paced, on-the-go nature of the fair’s sprawling, 1,200-acre campus, enterprising food vendors placed their Hamburg steaks between two slices of bread. This allowed the 20 million visitors to freely stroll around and marvel at x-ray machines, the world’s largest searchlight and the Ferris Wheel, while munching on a delicious portable meal. Catering to the mobile needs of walking fairgoers was clearly a thing that year: that’s also where the ice cream cone and cotton candy rose to stardom.

The rise in popularity of hamburgers triggered a boom for cattlemen and stabilized the beef industry. Premium cuts such as steaks and roasts typically account for about two-thirds of the overall carcass value. The remaining third goes to ground beef. By growing demand for hamburgers, the overall demand and value for beef grows, as processors can optimize the entire carcass.

Just this past weekend, proclaimed as the kick-off to grilling season, Americans ate over 150 million burgers. But the impact of these ground beef patties goes far beyond dads flipping them on backyard grills.

The hamburger gave rise to the modern fast-food industry. Its simplicity, portability, and affordability (well, at one time) made it ideal for efficient assembly line production for an evolving on-the-go culture. In doing so, it changed America’s dietary habits forever. Today, over 83,000 burger joints canvass the fruited plain, with McDonald’s and Burger King controlling one-quarter of them. McDonald’s built it’s an international empire – today they sell 75 burgers every second – on 15-cent hamburgers offered throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When I was a kid, you could get an entire meal (hamburger, fries and Coke) for under $1. My how times have changed.

With current beef prices, hamburgers are quickly losing their allure as an affordable food option. Ground beef is now selling for $8 per pound in many stores. At a friend’s holiday BBQ this past weekend, my wife joked that since they were serving hamburgers, she’ll have two, as they are now a delicacy.