Burger King vs. McDonald's

foreign [Music] versus McDonald's has to be the all-time biggest rivalry in fast food and I would even say among the biggest rivalries in any industry first off even though they have been direct competitors going back to the 1950s McDonald's has always been bigger they're like the original fast food icon as far as the system we know today and no other hamburger place has ever even had a realistic chance of catching up to them but Burger King has traditionally been the closest the standings are typically at McDonald's sitting their way in the lead with Burger King

at a distant second number three by the way is usually Wendy's though in 2012 they did briefly surpass Burger King in sales to take over that number two spot so Wendy's has been a part of all this as well in different ways but the Rivalry there isn't quite as extensive as the other two really since McDonald's has always been so far ahead most of the story here is about different ways that Burger King has been trying to catch up to them so for this video I'm gonna try to tell the story of Burger King while

highlighting 10 notable examples from over the years where they attempted to gain ground on McDonald's by they're following their lead or even by publicly attacking them starting at the very beginning in 1953 with McDonald's being a founding influence see that year Keith Kramer teamed up with his father-in-law Matthew Burns to open a fast food restaurant in Florida it was centered around this new cooking device that they really believed in called the insta Broiler so they called the restaurant insta Burger King the reason it's on my list here is because it is believed that they got

the idea of starting a fast food restaurant after seeing the success of the original McDonald's I have to point out that this was before Ray Kroc when McDonald's was still completely unknown outside of Southern California so the fact that they were already influencing a new restaurant opening on the other side of the country in Florida I think it's pretty amazing even at this early stage Burger King was following the lead of McDonald's or should I say insta Burger King which did grow into a chain and even introduced the iconic Whopper before experiencing financial difficulties in

1959 and that leads me to the next item on my list franchising James McLemore and David Edgerton were classmates at Cornell University that for the past five years had been franchisees of insta Burger King well in 1959 they were able to take advantage of the company's poor condition and buy it from those original Founders and from that point it started making a bunch of positive changes getting rid of that insta Broiler replacing it with their now famous Flame Broiler and of course getting rid of the insta from the name as well and just calling it

Burger King but maybe most importantly they implemented this aggressive franchising program now McDonald's is famous for the way that they used a franchising model to effectively grow The Chain by essentially having outside people pay McDonald's to open and operate new locations many fast food restaurants were influenced by this including Burger King but in a much different way McDonald's was very careful about it paying close attention to each individual franchisee forcing each location to wear the same uniforms serve the same food have the same prices they forced everything to be extra extremely similar between locations and

that way it didn't matter which McDonald's you went to you would be getting the same experience not quite the case with Burger King in an effort to grow quickly they made agreements that sacrificed control the main idea was that the franchisee would buy the rights to open Burger Kings in a specified territory and once they held those rights they could pretty much do whatever they wanted meaning and throughout the 1960s well into the 1970s unlike McDonald's most Burger Kings were very different from each other there was no consistent image and the customers had no idea

what to expect when they went to a new one which predictably proved to be an issue that was addressed by their new owners Pillsbury in 1967 when there were 274 very different Burger Kings in operation they were sold to Pillsbury for 18 million dollars I realized that might sound strange but this deal was the start of this whole thing where Pillsbury and their main competitor General Mills became heavily involved in the restaurant industry I have other videos about it if you want more details but back to my list getting away from franchising for a minute

in 1974 Burger King introduced have it your way probably their most famous slogan ever that was a direct response to a famous McDonald's campaign that was introduced earlier in that same year you probably know it it was a jingle about the ingredients on their Big Mac to all beef patties Special Sauce that whole thing it kind of goes back to how everything was so uniform at McDonald's that song was listing what you would get on a Big Mac so Burger King tried to expose that as a negative you know trying to seem Superior by advertising

how if you go to Burger King you can customize your orders your way their campaign even featured their own catchy song Hold the pickle hold the lettuce special orders don't upset us I'm singing way too much in this video they only use that campaign for a few years though because they felt that it also reminded the customers of the wait times at Burger King from all of those customized orders but they did bring it back because after all that time they still considered it to be their most memorable slogan all right back to my list

in 1977 Donald Smith was a senior your executive at McDonald's that was lured Away by Burger King when they hired him as their new president and CEO and then he replaced most of Burger King's management team with people from McDonald's who then worked together to implement changes to make the company operate much more like McDonald's probably the biggest part of it was making the restaurants more similar to each other they created stricter franchising agreements conducted unscheduled checkups of how they were operating things the company even took control of some of those franchises aside from the

uniformity that worked toward introducing a breakfast menu similar to what McDonald's Had recently done and implemented some new cooking methods that were also similar to McDonald's by the 1980s the changes were showing positive results and that is where the Rivalry really started heating up in 1982 McDonald's actually sued Burger King for some of their advertising claims it all started with a Burger King commercial for that year coincidentally starring actress Sarah Michelle Geller when she was five years old that one stands out because it was the first first time either one of these two restaurants had

ever mentioned each other by name in a commercial they made comparisons about the size of the burgers and how they were cooked followed by other commercials with other claims involving taste tests the specifics of which were challenged in the lawsuit that was ultimately settled but Burger King did get a lot of exposure from it and it sparked these Burger wars in the 1980s these wars started heating up again two years later when McDonald's introduced the mick DLT it was pretty much their response to the Whopper with a bit of a Twist of course it was

served in the special styrofoam container with the food separated in two different sections in an attempt to keep the hot side Hots in the cool side cool it really just seems like a gimmick to me it was discontinued after less than a decade I believe because of the negative impact that container was having on the environment but this one does stand out as being one of the few times McDonald's was responding to Burger King but I still have it on this list because Burger King addressed it with commercials directly talking about McDonald's and their Mig

DLT attempting to convince The View sure that the Whopper is superior so even though Burger King may have been the original in this case they still took the opportunity to publicly insult McDonald's I think this next one is kind of funny the bigger Whopper only a year later Burger King increased the size of their Whopper just slightly to 4.2 ounces technically making it bigger than the quarter pounder over at McDonald's and you better believe that they spent 30 million dollars on an advertising campaign telling the public all about it this commercial right here went as

far as to have two fast food employees crying that were meant to represent McDonald's and Wendy's upset about how their burgers were now comparatively smaller I mean this was some pretty aggressive advertising however that campaign wasn't at all successful nor were any of them really at that point they even had the strange one called where's herb about this guy who had never had a Whopper before I don't know but toward the end of the 1980s Burger King wasn't doing too well because I think anyone would agree that McDonald's was the one to come out ahead

in these Burger Wars in 1989 all of Pillsbury Ferry was bought by Grand Metropolitan who was a very large British company mostly known for their involvement in the liquor business it was this messy takeover where Pillsbury was actually trying to divest Burger King as a way to prevent it from happening but it did happen in less than a decade later that company merged with Guinness to create this really big liquor company called Diageo during the 1990s under their ownership the primary strategy they implemented for Burger King was to improve their menu dropping a bunch of

lower selling items making the higher selling ones bigger and better tasting and introducing new ones the two biggest introductions of the 1990s were the BK Broiler in 1990 but more relevant here would be the Big King in 1997 this right here without a doubt was their long-awaited response to the Big Mac it doesn't have that extra bun in the middle but the rest of the ingredients are pretty much the same it was originally tested as the double supreme but of course when it was launched nationally it was given the name Big King I would assume

to remind people of the big man when it was introduced again the commercials directly mentioned McDonald's attempting to convince the viewer that the Big King is superior by pointing out how it's like a Big Mac except it's flame broiled and has 75 percent more beef and then to go along with this another major menu change just a few months later was when they introduced their new fries I guess they started treating them with potato starch and it somehow forms a crispy coating I don't know how it works but they introduced them with a big 70

million dollar advertising campaign that included the cost of Licensing Mr Potato Head that was mostly centered around how the new fries were better than the fries at McDonald's the crispy new Burger King fries beat McDonald's fries in a nationwide taste test all of this did appear to help Burger King gain some ground on McDonald's but it wasn't very much and it was short-lived anyway from there Burger King has gone through a bunch of management and ownership changes in 2002 they were sold to Texas Pacific group for 1.5 billion dollars so Diageo could better focus on

their Core Business four years later they became publicly owned of four years after for that they were bought by 3G capital a private Equity Firm for over three billion dollars and four years after that they merged with Tim Hortons to create restaurant Brands International going back to the list the final thing I want to mention is the mick Whopper maybe you remember this one because it happened in 2015. Burger King took out these full page ads in the Chicago Tribune in the New York Times asking McDonald's to join up with them they wanted to team

up to open a restaurant for one day in Atlanta which is between the two companies headquarters and sell a burger that was a mixture of the Big Mac and the Whopper it would have been for charity they wanted it to be on International Day of Peace seemingly as a gesture of good faith ending this feud between them probably again more of a gimmick than anything but none of it matters anyway because McDonald's wasn't interested none of it ever happened so I suppose the Rivalry continues let me know in the comments what do you think of

Burger King and how do they compare to McDonald's which one do you prefer to go to which one has the better food which company is better obviously McDonald's has been the more significant one but Burger King has done some notable things to make their own Mark as well to me it seems unlikely but you think Burger King will ever pull ahead or maybe even fall behind Wendy's again and any other thoughts you have about Burger King McDonald's or anything else I talked about in this video leave them in the comments I'd like to hear what

you have to say thank you for watching [Music]