A burger joint obsessed with beef tallow fries is going all-in on the MAHA agenda.
Steak ’n Shake, a fast-casual burger destination with 391 locations nationwide, just announced that a former Trump administration official will join the company as its “first Chief MAHA Officer.” The company describes the job as an executive-level role “dedicated to advancing nutritional integrity, ingredient transparency, and the long-term health of Steak ’n Shake customers.”
Michael Boes, previously a senior advisor within HHS, will take on the new role. Boes helped shape the Trump administration’s reimagined food pyramid, which was released earlier this year. While many companies are steering clear of politics these days, Steak ’n Shake is betting big that close ties to the Trump administration can boost business.
MAHA, which stands for Make America Healthy Again, is the RFK Jr. wing of the MAGA agenda. Known for its devotion to rendered fats and a penchant for spontaneously performing chin-ups in jeans, the MAHA-verse stretches from the Trump health officials shaping national policy to an online web of influencers peddling everything from peptides and raw milk to nicotine. With MAHA, anecdotal evidence is king, scientific consensus is never settled, and there’s plenty of money to be made.
“Appointing a Chief MAHA Officer is a sign of our continued commitment to make Steak ’n Shake the great differentiator in fast food,” said Sardar Biglari, CEO of Biglari Holdings, which owns Steak ’n Shake. “To put it simply, good-tasting food should also be good for you.”
On the company’s homepage, a logo boasts of bitcoin and beef tallow tots, with an embedded video that features Kennedy praising the chain’s beef tallow recipes in a Fox News segment. “Steak ’n Shake just reached out, and people are raving about these french fries,” Kennedy said in the interview, which aired last year.
Inverting the food pyramid
With MAHA’s blessing, meat and animal products are having a massive marketing moment in the U.S.
In January, the Trump administration redesigned the classic nutritional food pyramid, giving it a full MAHA makeover. In the new pyramid, unveiled by Kennedy and Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in January, animal products get top billing along with fruits and veggies. “It’s upside down, a lot of people would say,” Kennedy said of the redesign. “But it was actually upside down before, and we just righted it.”
Whole grains make up the slim bottom portion of the pyramid, which is now mysteriously inverted. The design is bright and colorful but fails to convey much information: Are Americans meant to eat fewer bananas than strawberries? Is olive oil a healthier option than butter and nut oils? The new food pyramid sends the political message that MAHA wants to turn what we know upside down, but doesn’t accomplish much as an educational tool.
Nutrition experts are placing a greater emphasis on protein these days, but that doesn’t mean eating tallow-drenched fries can actually help your health. The American Heart Association still names saturated fat consumption as a risk factor for heart disease and stroke.
MAHA’s unusual champions
Steak ’n Shake isn’t the first unusual champion of the MAHA agenda. In an ad that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, the erratic former boxing champ Mike Tyson promoted MAHA and tied its priorities to his personal experiences.
“I was so fat and nasty. I would eat anything. … I had so much self-hate when I was like that, I just wanted to kill myself,” Tyson said in the ad, which flashes the phrase “processed food kills” on the screen. The ad was paid for by the MAHA Center Inc., an outside organization that supports Kennedy’s agenda, but the video is embedded on realfood.gov, an official government nutrition website.
It’s an unusual message for a government health agency to promote, to say the least. Tyson, previously vegan, once claimed he would be “very sick” if he ate red meat. “That’s probably why I was so crazy before,” he told Fox News more than a decade ago.