Researchers claim they've created healthier burgers that taste as good as a Big Mac

Researchers say they've trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to create burgers that diners rated as highly as those offered by a world-famous fast-food chain.

Stanford University researchers fed 2,216 burger recipes from Food.com into their AI tool, BurgerAI, to generate new burger recipes.

Some of the AI-designed burgers matched or outperformed a reconstructed version of McDonald's Big Mac in blind taste tests, the researchers reported in a study published in npj Science of Food.

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BurgerAI generated a recipe resembling the Big Mac "without explicit supervision." 

The researchers noted that the Big Mac "was never part of the initial training data." Instead, the AI arrived at a similar recipe by learning from people's taste preferences.

BurgerAI can also tailor burgers to be more nutritious, more environmentally sustainable and more personalized for gender, age and physical activity, according to a Stanford Report news release.

"Food choices are some of the most consequential decisions humans make every day," said Vahidullah Tac, a researcher who worked on the project.

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"Food was an easy motivator. With one arrow, you can hit two targets — planetary health and personal health. It's a great and impactful research area."

Ellen Kuhl, a Stanford professor of mechanical engineering who led the research, said most AI systems "are trained to predict what already exists.

"We wanted AI to invent what should exist next," Kuhl added.

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"BurgerAI does not ask, 'What burger is most likely?' It asks, 'What burger best satisfies these important and complex objectives?'"

Over 100 diners took part in a blind taste test of the AI burgers prepared by an executive chef at a San Francisco restaurant, the researchers said. 

Compared with the Big Mac, BurgerAI's Delicious Burgers scored the same or better in overall liking, flavor and texture, the researchers wrote.

"Its mushroom burger achieves an environmental impact score more than an order of magnitude lower; and its bean burger attains nearly twice the nutritional score," the study said.

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"We expected some trade-off between sustainability and consumer acceptance," Tac said. "But we found a burger with dramatically lower environmental impact could still compete with one of the world's most successful burgers."

Fox News Digital reached out to McDonald's for comment on the findings.

Generative AI has the potential to transform many areas beyond food, including pharmaceuticals and product design, the researchers said.

"For centuries, food design has been a matter of intuition, experience and trial and error," Kuhl said. "We are beginning to show that AI can transform food design into a quantitative science with applications in other important fields."

She added that the burger "is just the beginning."

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"We see food as a model system for a much larger vision: AI as a partner in scientific and engineering discovery."