Flipping burgers on their head

Ihave a favourite restaurant in Wellington which does extraordinary things with food, has quirky service and a – potentially literally – knock-yourself-out wine list. The menu of Hillside Kitchen and Cellar is everchanging so you can experience a broad range of food cooked in ways you’d never thought of.

So, I was utterly flawed when it announced it was going ‘‘meat free’’.

It’s not that I have anything against vegetarian food, it’s just that I know a lot of people who like Hillside and like its meat as well.

So, has Hillside taken a huge risk or is it just way ahead of the game, offering a top-end, vegetarian menu and creating a market in New Zealand that doesn’t exist yet?

It used to be that marketers would establish their target audience and develop products to suit them. But things changed when a chap called Steve Jobs came along and founded Apple.

He told us we didn’t know what we wanted and started to produce technology that did things we never imagined we needed. His innovation flipped the traditional marketing approach on its head, solving problems and fulfilling needs we didn’t know we had.

Vegetarianism – and its new trendy cousin flexitarianism – has been around and growing for a while but it’s still unusual for a high-end restaurant with a loyal clientele to suddenly ditch meat.

A flexitarian, in case you’re wondering, is a vegetarian who occasionally falls off the wagon for the sake of a bacon buttie or sausage sarnie.

Perhaps Hillside is being the Steve Jobs of food – dragging us Luddites into a new age and giving us meals we never dreamed of, while also pointing out the said dangers of meat production on the environment and perhaps our digestive systems too.

Coincidentally, just as I was having a quiet beef to friends about Hillside’s move, some Kiwis were belly aching about the introduction of Air New Zealand’s fake meat ‘‘Impossible Burger’’.

Stealing first mover advantage, Air New Zealand last week introduced the meat-free burger on its Business Class menu.

Launched in collaboration with Silicon Valley food tech start-up Impossible Foods, the burger reflects our national airline’s desire to lead innovation in onboard service. Air NZ’s ‘‘on trend’’ for our changing tastes, perhaps before most of us even knew they were shifting.

Unlike Hillside Kitchen, the airline hasn’t ditched meat entirely, but the burger still managed to incur the ire of politicians and the meat industry who interpreted the move as a slap in the face for our farmers.

Those farmers might well have reason to be fearful of a rising trend worldwide.

Impossible Foods’ non-meaty meat is already stocked by more than 2500 US restaurants. And, in New Zealand a 2016 ANZ Roy Morgan poll showed one in 10 Kiwis follows a vegetarian diet and on average we’re eating 20 kilograms less red meat each year.

Both Hillside and Air NZ are innovative companies that like to push the boundaries. It’s not about the meat – it’s making us think about what’s possible.

Today, as I Facetimed my daughter who’s in the middle of a US forest on a scout camp, I thanked Steve Jobs, who made that conversation possible long before I knew I needed it.

It’ll be a long time yet before I totally stop eating meat but right now I applaud these companies for thinking ahead and delivering things we don’t yet know we need.

It’s the imagination and inventiveness of big and small companies that keep us moving ahead.