When I was younger, the Big Mac was the unit everyone understood. A pair of trainers was “twenty Big Macs” and a concert ticket was “about ten”. The burger even has its own index: since 1986, The Economist has used its price to compare what money is worth from one country to another. It worked as a measure because it was the same product everywhere, cheap, and known by everyone.
Listen to young French people today and the unit has changed. A T-shirt is “two Tasty Crousty”, and a night out costs a few more. The Big Mac has not disappeared, but it is no longer the reference they reach for.
What is Tasty Crousty?
For readers outside France, some context. Tasty Crousty is a French fast-food chain built on a single dish, the crousty: a box of rice topped with crispy chicken coated in panko, with two sauces. It grew on TikTok from 2024 and had more than 60 restaurants across France by April 2026, with first openings in Belgium. The French press calls its young fans the “Tasty Crousty generation”. A crousty costs around €11 in most of its restaurants.
This is a very French phenomenon, and almost nobody outside France and Belgium has heard of it. That is exactly what makes it interesting as a unit of value.
What changed, and what didn’t
The habit itself is not new. Young people have always priced things in the treat of their age, and for my generation that treat was the Big Mac. What has changed is the treat they pick. The Big Mac was a global brand, pushed by advertising, the same in every city and known by everyone’s parents. The crousty is a local brand that their own generation made famous on TikTok, that most adults have never tasted, and eating one is a small event you share with friends and often film. Using it as a unit is also a way of showing you belong to the group that gets the reference.
So the way Gen Z judges value may be much the same as before, but the references they judge it against now come from their peers and stay invisible to anyone outside the group. That is an observation, not a measured result, and it is exactly the kind of idea I would want to test in interviews.
And concretely, for your studies?
The first lesson is to let respondents give their own reference. When you test price or value with Gen Z, don’t stop at “is €25 expensive for this?”. Ask what they would compare it to. The answer tells you what your product really competes with in their head, and it is often outside your category.
The second lesson is that local references don’t travel. A reference that is obvious in Paris means nothing in London or Milan, so in a study across several countries, collect the local references in each market rather than translating one from the questionnaire. The Big Mac made us believe the world would share the same benchmarks. Gen Z is building its own, market by market, and a study that doesn’t ask for them will miss how they really judge value.
Sources
- Tasty Crousty, Wikipédia
- “Tasty Crousty à Bruxelles : le nouveau phénomène fast-food qui séduit la Gen Z”, Moustique, 12 April 2026