Max Burgers

Curt Bergfors and Britta Fredriksson opened the first Max in 1968 in Gällivare, a mining town in Swedish Lapland. The name came from Bergfors’s nickname, borrowed from the actor Max von Sydow. For two decades Max was a northern Swedish thing, with just one restaurant outside Norrland, before expanding across the country in the 1990s.

It has a rare distinction: it beat McDonald’s on home turf. In 1991 McDonald’s closed its restaurants in Umeå and Luleå, where Max was already dominant, and in 2007 it pulled out of several more northern towns. Max is still family-owned, and it prints the climate footprint of every burger on its menu, something few chains do.

About 155 restaurants in Sweden, plus branches in Poland, Norway, Denmark and, through franchising, Egypt.