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The unusual hamburger patties arrived at A&W Canada headquarters packed in dry ice, just before Christmas 2017. In the kitchen that dominates the centre of the North Vancouver office, A&W’s chief executive Susan Senecal and her team watched as a colleague cooked a patty and cut it into little triangles.

For almost a decade, Senecal had been part of A&W’s search for a new veggie burger — one people would want, “not the one they’d settle for.” The patty her executive team was eager to try was from Beyond Meat, the California producer with celebrity investors. Senecal took a piece.

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“This is it,” Senecal recalled saying. “We kind of decided then and there.”

Senecal, who has spent 26 years with the company, has been involved in nearly every right decision A&W has made in the past decade, transforming a chain of drive-in restaurants popular with nostalgic baby boomers to a progressive, aggressively expanding empire with nearly 1,000 locations, second only to McDonald’s in the Canadian hamburger trade.