It’s safe to say that 2023 will not go down as one of the better years in the history of Burger King. So many of the chain’s larger franchisees filed for bankruptcy or closed large swaths of stores that at times it became almost a guessing game as to who would be next.
What a difference three years, billions of dollars, a number of new executives, a cool marketing partnership, a new ad campaign and a timely and fortuitous viral video make.
Burger King is having a moment. The fast-food chain, which has more often than not outperformed its fast-food competitors for the past three years, has just put together one of the better runs in its recent history.
It started with the Spongebob Movie Menu in December, part of a marketing partnership with Nickelodeon that generated strong sales among a group the chain considers crucial: Families. That traffic kept coming into the chain’s restaurants into January.
The company then kicked off a very public effort to gather feedback from customers by giving out the phone number of the brand’s president, Tom Curtis, who runs Burger King in the U.S. and Canada. The chain then reconfigured its Whopper, and Curtis took a big bite of the sandwich on a video and went viral for it just before an ad campaign premiered during the Oscars telecast that effectively promises a better Burger King.
Early results show a traffic boost for the chain and then the company generated more social media attention after customers tried the new Whopper in the “jewelry case” that it now comes in.
“It’s a resurgence,” Jim Backes, a longtime Burger King franchisee and 40-year veteran of the brand, said in an interview. We’re “starting to take our rightful place in the industry.”
That resurgence could not come at a better time. Burger King, parent Restaurant Brands International and the chain’s franchisees have spent billions on the brand’s turnaround. And they could use a return on that investment this year.
A tough history
In the fast-food burger war, Burger King has for years lagged behind its two chief rivals, McDonald’s and Wendy’s. Once the country’s second-largest restaurant chain, the Miami-based brand has struggled with frequent ownership and management changes.
The brand’s efforts to match McDonald’s low prices only made matters worse. Burger King’s use of its infamous King mascot with a giant plastic head won awards for its creativity but divided customers, turning off families that are crucial to the mass-market fast-food business. The chain’s sales could not keep up with McDonald’s during that period, turning an average-unit volume gulch into a canyon.
The King hasn’t appeared in ads for years, but the company, which is making it clear that it wants more families coming to its restaurants, made a point of “firing” the king in its recent ad campaign. “At the end of the day, we’re a brand for everyone,” Joel Yashinsky, chief marketing officer for Burger King in the U.S. and Canada, said in a recent interview. “You can’t have a polarizing figure that’s creepy, misogynistic.”
The company also relied too heavily on discounts for marketing, and when things went wrong, Burger King fell back on those discounts, even when consumers were not pushing for them. That happened in 2021, after the chain’s entry into the chicken sandwich wars proved to be an operations and sales disaster.
By 2022, Burger King’s average-unit volumes were less than half that of McDonald’s and about three-quarters the amount as Wendy’s. A typical Burger King made just $140,000 in per-store EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—a disastrous level of profitability.
That explains the rash of bankruptcies and closures that have hit the chain in the past few years, particularly 2023, when three major operators declared bankruptcy and several others closed restaurants.
RBI recognized this issue and in 2022 brought in former Domino’s CEO Patrick Doyle to become the company’s executive chairman and clean things up. But the company already announced a $400 million fix-it plan for Burger King to encourage remodels and boost marketing. That plan included a higher marketing fund contribution from the chain’s franchisees.
And it had already brought in Curtis, himself a former Domino’s executive, to improve operations. He was then named brand president.
Burger King restaurants with the new Sizzle image generate 13.8% more in sales. | Photo courtesy of Burger King.
The revitalization plan
Most revitalization plans stop at the initial investment. But Burger King kept going. It bought Carrols Restaurant Group for $1 billion to speed its remodel plan. It has already started refranchising those stores, many of whom are going to former Burger King executives, and expects most of the system to be in a new image by 2028, a major milestone for a chain that has tried to get there for nearly two decades.
That is fueling what has been one of the biggest efforts in the chain’s history, a shift from large-scale franchisees with hundreds of locations to those in which the owner can drive to each of their restaurants. RBI CEO Josh Kobza and Doyle have long said they believe such smaller operators are ultimately better for the brand.
Curtis, meanwhile, embarked on an operations-improvement effort. Restaurant turnarounds don’t work if consumers don’t like the places they’re asked to eat, and so the company worked with operators to improve the way restaurants are run. Stores are steered to better franchisees. Remodel incentives were given to better operators.
And the company used some powerful incentives: An operator ranked as “A” under the Burger King system made $50,000 more in per-store profit than the system average. That also encourages those operators to keep developing. “You actually see pretty compelling paybacks across the A operators,” Sami Siddiqui, RBI’s chief financial officer, told analysts in February.
“It’s what you sign up for in a franchise business,” Backes said. “If you want to do your own thing at your own pace, that’s fine. But in a franchise business, we’re only as good as our weakest restaurants. If there’s some weak restaurants out there, we need to keep pulling them up.”
Remodels have been generating sales growth, too. The average sales uplift from remodels has been 13.8%, according to the company’s franchise disclosure document. That includes traffic uplift of 12.8% on average.
Burger King’s efforts today haven’t been without its hiccups, mostly due to an environment that hasn’t exactly been friendly to large-scale fast-food chains. Much of the brand’s customer base has been reducing their frequency, which has created enormous problems for numerous brands.
In addition, beef costs have been soaring. They rose 20% last year, which ate into operator profitability. Store-level EBITDA declined by about $25,000 per location last year to $180,000—a decline due almost entirely to food cost inflation.
Stores continue to close, too, though the number has slowed markedly. The chain finished 2025 with 51 fewer restaurants than it operated the year before, down from a peak of 264 net closures in 2023. Burger King has closed 454 restaurants since the beginning of 2022.
Still, the chain has outperformed the fast-food sector for nine of the past 12 quarters and did so without resorting to the type of discounts it had done in the past.
Same-store sales grew 2.6% in the fourth quarter last year. What’s more, much of that came after the SpongeBob promotion, which drew the families that executives have long coveted.
“Momentum is a big thing.” -Jim Backes, longtime Burger King franchisee.
Listening and upgrading
Tom Curtis doesn’t go anywhere without wearing something with the Burger King logo. To him, it’s a way of gathering customer feedback. Because someone always approaches him.
“If I’m in an airport, I always wear a vest, or if I’m wearing a jacket, it’s got the logo on it,” he said in an interview in February. “I don’t get much done very quickly because I’m always involved in a conversation, because everybody knows Burger King, and trust me, I’ve heard the good, the bad and the ugly.”
This year, Curtis put that effort into another gear and, with it, Burger King’s comeback plan.
The company started by publicizing Curtis’s work phone number so he could take in a lot more of that feedback. The conversations were recorded over a two-week period, though Curtis promised that he would continue to collect that feedback afterward.
That effort was a genuine strategy to collect feedback from more restaurants. It is, after all, difficult to get to each one of the chain’s restaurants. “I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but I don’t get to 7,000 restaurants in one year,” he said.
Curtis also had members of his executive team listen to some of the conversations. Yashinsky talked to more than 100 customers himself over a one-week period. “He has been so energized by every one of these conversations,” Yashinsky said. “This can’t be just a promotion. We need to make this part of who we are in terms of listening to our guests.”
The campaign also introduced the public to Curtis, who would become front-and-center of the chain’s efforts this year, more so than even he knew would happen.
Along with the operations improvements, Burger King started upgrading its menu items. Brands are learning that even subtle upgrades to its menu can lure customers. So the company as part of a broad-based menu improvement effort this year launched an upgraded Whopper. It also brought Amy Alarcon, creator of sister-chain Popeyes Chicken Sandwich, to lead the menu-improvement effort.
The Whopper upgrades are subtle, with a taller bun coated to give it a more golden color, an upgraded, fattier mayo, and new packaging. The burger is half-wrapped in paper and presented in a box. The whole thing takes on a far better appearance but comes across as fresher.
Curtis took a bite out of one, said that it only needed a napkin, and went viral. “The timing of all this is fantastic for us, with Tom taking the bite heard around the world,” Yashinsky said. “That’s what people saw with Tom. He’s that authentic. He’s a real person who cares about the brand, who loves the food, loves Burger King.”
Burger King appeared to come out on top, with traffic to the chain’s restaurants spiking 7.4% the week the video went viral, according to data from the customer traffic tracking firm Placer.ai, compared with a more muted 2.2% increase at McDonald’s.
And then the company launched its more traditional ad campaign, again featuring Curtis, acknowledging Burger King’s mistakes of the past, and vowing to get all of it right. The ad highlighted the Whopper and promised more changes to come. The ad “fired” the king and declared that the customer is king at the chain
“This is four years in the making,” Yashinsky said.
Burger King certainly has more coming. It has since launched the latest effort in its Whopper by You limited-time offer, a Peppercorn BLT that joins past customer-suggested efforts like Ultimate Steakhouse, Maple Bourbon, BBQ Brisket and Crispy Onion.
The company also has a ways to go before it can declare victory. But kicking off a year by luring more of the type of customers you want, then going viral at the outset of a menu-improvement effort, then kicking off an ad campaign, is real progress.
“There’s no reason we’re not No. 1,” Backes said. “We have the product to do it. We just haven’t had the commitment throughout our history and the consistency. There’s room to grow average volumes. We’re starting to see that now.
“Momentum is a big thing.”