21 things you didn’t know about Burger King

In 1953, Keith J. Kramer and his uncle-in-law, Matthew Burns, founded a restaurant based around the Insta-Broiler, a fast and efficient way to cook numerous burgers at once. Fittingly, they chose the name, Insta-Burger King. The first franchise opened a year later, with the two franchisees, James McLamore and David Edgerton, eventually buying the whole company in 1959 and renaming it Burger King.

McDonald’s is headquartered in Downey, California. Taco Bell and In-N-Out are both in Irvine, California. Chipotle, Jack in the Box, Qdoba, Panda Express, and IHOP are also based in California…but not Burger King. The King lives on the East Coast, as the aforementioned Insta-Burger was founded in Jacksonville, Florida, and the company is currently headquartered in Miami. 

Only four years after Insta-Burger King first opened, the restaurant unveiled its most famous creation — the Whopper — and charged just 37 cents for one. (Although that was quite the increase compared to 18 cents for their existing burgers.) James McLamore came up with the idea after noticing that a rival joint successfully sold a larger-than-average burger. And no, it wasn’t McDonald’s Big Mac, which wasn’t invented until 1967.

The Insta-Broilers worked well for a while, but eventually, the meat drippings would damage the heating element. After taking a hatchet to one machine in frustration, David Edgerton vowed to find a better way to cook a burger. In 1959 — the same year the chain dropped “Insta” from its name (but not 1954, like the signs claim) — he invented a device that used a conveyor belt to cook patties over an open gas flame, giving the burgers a distinctive taste as well as their signature grill marks.

In 1963, Luis Arenas-Pérez was preparing to open the first Burger King location in Carolina, Puerto Rico, but the Whopper buns didn’t arrive in time for the Grand Opening. Instead, he used the smaller buns available locally. The scaled-down version became a hit and was eventually added to menus worldwide as a “Whopper Jr.”

When Burger King first expanded into Australia in 1971, it faced a unique problem: The name had already been trademarked in the country. Instead, BK HQ gave the first franchisee, Jack Cowin, a list of names to choose from, and he selected “Hungry Jack.” The pancake mix brand of the same name had no problem with this, as both Hungry Jack and Burger King were owned by Pillsbury at the time, but the restaurant’s name was still slightly altered to “Hungry Jack’s.” Hungry Jack’s now has about 450 locations in Australia!

McDonald’s used to boast about how many customers they served, but Burger King has a startling number, too. In fact, they serve a whopping (no pun intended) 11 million customers worldwide every day. In the 2021 financial year, that added up to $1.81 billion in revenue!

As of 2021, Burger King operates 19,247 locations worldwide in more than 100 countries. We should note, however, that saying Burger King runs these stores isn’t totally accurate, as almost 100% of BK locations are owned and operated by independent franchisees. 

When BK expanded into Illinois in the 1960s, they discovered the name “Burger King” was already trademarked by a small mom-and-pop operation run by the Hoots family in the town of Mattoon. The family sued, and BK responded with their suit, Burger King of Florida, Inc. v. Hoots. The result? Burger King could operate anywhere in the state outside of Mattoon, with the Hoots keeping the exclusive rights within a 20-mile radius around the town. The closest BK now sits 25 miles away from Mattoon.

In 2016, Burger King made headlines for a location they opened in Helsinki, Finland. It wasn’t the first BK to open in the country, but it was the first one in the world to include a spa! In addition to a 15-person sauna, the restaurant features timber and stone decor, two huge flatscreen TVs, a PlayStation, and a fridge stocked with beer! The rental cost? About $300, not including the burgers.

Burger King is synonymous with America, but it’s actually owned by a Canada-based parent company, Restaurant Brands International (RBI). This holding company was formed in 2014 when BK merged with the Canadian donut chain Tim Horton’s. RBI acquired Popeye’s in 2017 and Firehouse Subs in 2021, making them the fifth-largest fast-food conglomerate in the world behind McDonald’s, Subway, Starbucks, and YUM! Brands (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC).

Before the creepy King mascot, Burger King’s spokes character was a boring nerd named Herb (played by Jon Menick) who had never tried a Whopper. The “Where’s Herb?” ad campaign encouraged people to try to spot him at a Burger King restaurant, and if they did, they could win $5,000. Despite Super Bowl commercials, a stint on MTV, and a cameo during WrestleMania, the campaign was a confusing failure and the final one that the famous J. Walter Thompson agency produced for the chain.

Back in the ‘80s, Burger King launched a campaign criticizing the burgers at McDonald’s and Wendy’s, claiming the competition offered smaller patties that were fried and didn’t fare as well in taste tests. McDonald’s sued as a result, and the lawsuit even included the young actress who appeared in the commercials: a newcomer named Sarah Michelle Gellar. As a result, Gellar had to testify in court and subsequently avoided eating at McDonald’s for fear of getting recognized (although she wasn’t actually banned, as some sources claim). “It was tough because, when you're a little kid, McDonald's is where all your friends have their birthday parties,” Gellar recalled. “So I missed out on a lot of apple pies.”

Most of us can’t remember a time before fast food chains teamed with movie studios to promote new films — because it first happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, thanks to Burger King. In 1977, BK launched a campaign that centered around the new hit movie “Star Wars” and included promotional posters, stickers, and drinking glasses. Of course, this was just the beginning of the partnership between these two powerhouses!

McDonald’s has a Gold Card, and Burger King has a Crown Card — different names, but each allows the holder to get free food for life at the respective restaurant chain. You can’t buy a Crown Card, which has to be gifted by the corporate headquarters to particular celebrity recipients. George Lucas has one dating back to BK’s co-branding days with the Star Wars franchise, Jennifer Hudson has one because she used to work there as a teen, and Hugh Laurie, Robert Downey Jr., and Jay Leno are among the other known holders.

In an appeal to left-handed folks worldwide, Burger King once advertised a Whopper with the condiment orientation rotated 180 degrees to appeal to left-handed patrons. The commercials worked, and people headed to their local restaurant requesting this “new burger.” However, these folks didn’t realize that you could just rotate the burger yourself…or that the phony offer began on April 1, 1998 — April Fool’s Day.

Back in the early days of social media, Burger King began a Facebook campaign that promised a free Whopper to anyone willing to unfriend 10 people on the platform. Even worse, those who got unfriended received a notification that their former friend sacked them in favor of a sandwich. The 2009 campaign, dubbed “The Whopper Sacrifice,” was nevertheless successful, as 234,000 users were unfriended during the promotion.

If you think the best smell in the world is a freshly flame-broiled Whopper, you’ll be pleased to know a perfume once existed with this exact fragrance. Introduced in 2015 in Japan, the perfume was initially thought to be an April Fool’s Day prank. Still, the limited edition perfume was actually a real item that could be purchased for $42 — and included a free Whopper, of course.

Burger King restaurants in the U.S. experimented with black buns as part of a 2018 Halloween promotion, but that’s old news for BK patrons in the land of the rising sun. Locations in Japan first started selling Whoppers with buns dyed black (using bamboo charcoal) back in 2015!

If a black burger isn’t for you, how about a pink one? Burger King locations in Thailand temporarily sold both colors in 2021 in honor of Valentine’s Day and also to capitalize on the success of the K-pop supergroup BLACKPINK. The black was a double-grilled onion burger, the pink featured a fried and breaded salmon filet, and both used natural ingredients to color the buns.

A moldy Whopper seems like an odd image for an advertising campaign, but that’s exactly what Burger King used in 2020 — and the idea isn’t all that crazy. There have been plenty of viral videos featuring McDonald’s burgers that are 6, 10, and even 24 years old but don’t have any mold, so Burger King used an extremely moldy burger that was only a month old to showcase their commitment to not using any artificial preservatives. The relatively inexpensive “Moldy Whopper” campaign achieved a level of awareness 50% greater than their 2019 Super Bowl commercial — which cost at least $5 million!