- The fast-food marketing arms race has taken increasingly bizarre turns.
- Burger King Thailand has released a 100-patty burger that costs nearly $300.
Burger King has been practically marinated in the spirit of competition from day one.
The brand came into the world just a year before McDonald's, the company that would become its archnemesis.
Initially, Burger King's "have it your way" slogan was a fun nod to its main selling point compared to rival McDonald's. Burger King, after all, offered the freedom to customize your Whopper in any number of ways.
But as the fast-food scene has become more cluttered and more competitive, brands have been pulling out all the stops to stand out, and in the escalating fast-food arms race, an old slogan is no longer enough. Which is how, 69 years after Burger King was founded, we find ourselves staring a monstrous, 100-patty burger straight in the face.
Follow along for a quick run-through of how Burger King's gimmick-marketing machine ended up in overdrive.
1954: Burger King is founded. The world is a simpler place.
1974: Burger King rolls out the now-famous slogan.
2009: Burger King introduces the option to have a burger made of your friends through the "Whopper Sacrifice," an app that allows you to sacrifice — delete — 10 Facebook friends for a free Whopper. Each sacrifice appears in your activity feed, so everyone knows who you deleted for a Whopper.
2012: Burger King Brazil secretly photographs customers so it can print their faces onto Whopper wrappings. Each burger is genuinely unique and also a bit creepy.
July 2023: Burger King Thailand unleashes the "Real Cheese Burger" upon the world, featuring twenty slices of cheese and nothing else between two buns.
July 2023: My colleague Marielle Descalsota tests the 20-cheese-slice burger and promptly wishes she hadn't.
July 2023: A week after the debut of the real cheese burger, the Thai chain one-ups itself by releasing the Real Meat Burger, a vegetarian's nightmare consisting solely of patties. Its 100 patty version costs 10,039 baht, or around $290. A food blogger in Bangkok shared a video of himself ordering the burger, and it's worth noting that he came out of the experience saying he thinks "five to 10 patties is the perfect amount."
So there you have it — a culmination of decades of escalating efforts. And to think things started so innocently, with "have it your way" just meaning "hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us."
And while Burger King might have the spotlight right now, the competition is stiffer than ever. Let us not forget the Grimace Shake, which recently sparked a TikTok trend of users filming their McDonald's-purple-drink-fueled fainting spells, or Pizza Hut Taiwan's AI-generated pizza toppings that dared to pair squid with Oreos.