Tom Curtis was named chief operating officer at Burger King in 2021 and was quickly promoted to president. Since then, the company has worked aggressively to improve operations inside its restaurants. This year, he’s taken calls from customers to get their views on the brand and more recently he signed up for restaurant shifts to hear what customers experience every day.
The work is paying off. According to data from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic, 41% of Burger King customers rated their most recent visit as “excellent,” up from 35% a year ago. It also bests the scores at the company’s primary rivals, McDonald’s (36%) and Wendy’s (39%).
Indeed, the Miami-based chain has improved its customer scores on almost every metric that Technomic tracks, from the ordering experience to the coffee quality to the music selection.
The result has been a strong improvement in same-store sales, including 5.8% in the first quarter.
This is the latest piece of evidence highlighting Burger King’s operations-led comeback effort. That effort, which remains very much a work in progress, offers some real lessons for restaurant companies looking to improve their results.
Marketing is great, and Burger King’s numbers didn’t truly improve until it had innovative enough marketing to lure customers to its restaurants. But no marketing works well if the restaurants look and operate like garbage.
This lesson can be seen throughout the restaurant industry. Chili’s comeback began not with social media marketing but with improvements in its restaurants. Starbucks didn’t emerge from its two-plus year walk through the weak sales wilderness until it invested in people inside stores.
Of course, both of those chains have it easier than Burger King because they are largely corporate enterprises, though Starbucks has a hefty licensed business, but that’s another story.
It’s much easier for corporate stores to improve operations because they can dip into their cashflow and invest behind in-store service. Or they can redirect funds from corporate overhead to fund labor or capital improvements in stores, as Starbucks did.
Franchisees are another matter, because those franchisors have only an indirect impact on their operations. That means they have to rely on corporate incentives, or punishments, to cajole franchisees into running good stores. Or they must be really, really convincing.
Burger King also came into this situation with a serious weakness: Its franchisees were struggling, badly. Few chains have had the bankruptcy filings and outright collapses among large-scale franchisees that the brand had.
It had low unit volumes, and low store profitability, and when franchisees’ profits are down they cut costs, which hurts sales even more.
Fixing that, in other words, has been no easy feat. And Burger King executives will be the first to tell you that they still have a long way to go before they can say their job is done. But their work thus far has been impressive.