Every restaurant (dine-in, not fast food) serves a burger that’s extra lean, often a hundred percent lean. There’s a reason. Better mouth feel, better value for the customer’s dollar, and higher quality beef used in production.

You’re not paying just for less fat, you’re also paying for better beef. I worked in a butcher’s and later in a steakhouse that trimmed its own steaks. In both cases, because they were buying meat by the pound, they would be purchasing meat that was sold to them untrimmed, resulting in a lot of gristle, undigestible fat called silverback, and tendons. The cheaper meat in the butcher’s was always full of this gristle and tough tissues along with fat and ground together. This made hamburger that was better for slow cooking recipes where the tissues would gelatinize, but made for absolutely nauseating hamburgers from a mouth-feel perspective. They were chewy, fibrous, and bland.

Higher quality burgers/steaks have all this extra fat, silverback, and gristle trimmed off before they’re cooked/ground. It’s more expensive because you’re getting primarily just the edible beef and tissue fats, not all the extra stuff mixed in. This results in a product that cooks more uniformly and with less melting away, resulting in a better product for your dollar.

However, you have to be willing to pay for that better product., just like anything else. It’s not always about the fat content of the beef, but all the extras that the customer isn’t aware that they’re getting. No one who has trimmed meat before will skimp on it if they don’t have to.

Based on the above tables, I have calculated the approximate percent of “loss” of each type of meat after cooking (loss of water and fat)

Super lean = 12.67oz/16oz = 79% meat retained (21% loss)
Regular burger = 11oz/16oz = 69% meat retained after draining(31% loss)

To figure out the cost of meat per COOKED pound, simply take the price of burger and DIVIDE it by these percents (move the decimal over to be 0.79 and 0.69).

For example:

Super lean burger @ $4.50 per pound: 4.50/0.79 = 5.69 per cooked lb
Regular burger @ $2.00 per pound: 2.00/0.69 = 2.90 per cooked/drained lb

Clearly, the regular burger IS a better deal. HOWEVER, just be aware that it’s not always the fat that becomes a “filler” for burger. Another “filler” is all the connective tissue and “gristle” that makes burger sometimes kinda chewy. I don’t know much about store bought burger, but sometimes these are also determining factors for the price of burger, and not only the fat content.