The head of Hell Pizza says he doesn't think the company has "outwardly" deceived people by advertising a new pizza as including "a medium rare burger patty" when the patty was actually a vegetable product.
Last week the company had its new "burger pizza" for sale. Thousands of Kiwis around the country bought them, most assuming "a medium rare burger patty" meant a meat patty.
Seven Sharp reports the patties actually contained plant-based pea protein and were made by US company Beyond Meat.
Hell Pizza general manager Ben Cumming was asked does he agree that the company has deceived people.
"Look, no, I don't think we've deceived people outwardly," he replied.
"You know, we've been very proactive with responding to people's feedback. And if anyone did ask, obviously we were very clear about what the product is. But calling it a burger patty is not untrue."
Pressed by presenter Hilary Barry, who said most reasonable people would assume that a medium rare burger patty did contain meat, Mr Cumming said, "Yeah perhaps. And that was part of the point of the campaign, was to lead them to believe that it was a meat-based product as it was so convincing."
He said Hell Pizza cares about the planet and offered the burger pizza because it wanted to "make people a bit more aware of what was out there in the world of plant-based meat options".
"But we also know there's a lot of sceptisism toward veganisim and plant-based meats from people who don't eat them normally," he added.
The company had "tried a lot of really poor, inedible plant-based foods" in the past, but the ones from Beyond Meat were "really convincing and pretty delicious," he said.
"So we thought it'd be a great idea to actually just advertise it in a really subtle way. We just called them burger patties instead of saying specifically what they're made of, and that way we could get as many people to try them as possible, and hopefully just open their minds into what was out there and how they can actually taste these days."
Mr Cumming said feedback has been mixed but "the vast majority has been really good".
Hell Pizza had sent out a survey to the customers who tried the product the week after it was launched, and "over 80 per cent of people really enjoyed it after finding out that it was plant-based".
"There's a small minority of people who didn't really agree with the way we did it," he said.
Hell Pizza has got some really valuable feedback about what customers think about the plant-based patties, "so we can decide what to do about it later on," Mr Cumming said.
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