Burger King Corporation

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A Burger King restaurant in Warsaw, Poland.

© MrFly/Dreamstime.com

Burger King Corporation, restaurant company specializing in flame-broiled fast-food hamburgers. It is the second largest hamburger chain in the United States, after McDonald’s, and one of the most successful brands in fast-food history. In the early 21st century, Burger King claimed to have about 14,000 stores in nearly 100 countries. Headquarters are in Miami, Florida.

According to the company, Burger King was started in 1954 by James W. McLamore and David Edgerton in Miami. Other sources, however, trace Burger King back to Insta-Burger King, a venture founded in Jacksonville, Florida, by Keith Kramer and Matthew Burns in 1953. McLamore and Edgerton sold their first franchises in 1959, and Burger King soon became a national chain. The company expanded ouside the United States in 1963 with a store in Puerto Rico.

Persistently lagging behind McDonald’s in sales and profitability, Burger King underwent many changes of ownership and corporate governance. In 1967 it was sold to the Pillsbury Company, which, in the late 1970s, brought in Donald N. Smith, a former McDonald’s executive, who revitalized Burger King by expanding the menu and tightening control of franchisees. Pillsbury was itself acquired by the British company Grand Metropolitan (Grand Met) PLC in 1989. Grand Met became Diageo PLC after its merger with the Irish brewer Guinness PLC in 1997. Diageo sold Burger King in 2002 to a consortium of private equity financiers, namely the Texas Pacific Group, Bain Capital, and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. In 2010 3G Capital, an investment group controlled by the Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann, took over the company in a leveraged buyout. By 2012, Burger King shares were being sold to the public again, but 3G retained a controlling interest. Burger King Worldwide merged with the Canadian doughnut and fast-food chain Tim Hortons in 2014, and a new parent company called Restaurant Brands International was formed. In what some critics saw as a tax-avoiding “corporate inversion” move, Restaurant Brands International was headquartered in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

A large hamburger called the Whopper is Burger King’s signature product. The Whopper was introduced in 1957, at a time when its competitor McDonald’s was still selling only small hamburgers. The chain took a new direction by adding hot dogs to the menu in 2016.