20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About Burger King

Bizarre facts about Canada's least favourite restaurant

Located in San Bernardino, the first McDonald€™s was successful enough to inspire imitators, so by the 1950s, thanks to franchises such as Carl€™s Jr and Jack In The Box, Southern California had become the true home of fast food and was ready to export its values to the rest of America. In 1953, Keith G Cramer, who owned Keith€™s Drive-In Restaurant in Daytona Beach, Florida, heard about the McDonald brothers and, after eating at their restaurant, partnered with his father-in-law to open Insta-Burger-King. Unlike the McDonald€™s, though, Cramer ran into financial difficulties almost immediately so James McLamore and David Edgerton, two Miami-based franchisees, bought the company, renamed it Burger King and in 1957 added the company€™s signature product, the Whopper, to the menu. Ranked third on QSR Magazine€™s list of global fast food franchises (behind Subway and McDonald€™s), Burger King has over 13,000 outlets in 79 countries, employs more than 34,000 people and in 2012 reported revenue of $1.97 billion. 3G Capital, the Brazilian private equity firm that also owns Budweiser and Heinz, is BK€™s majority owner, having paid $4 billion for the company in 2010. In 2014, 3G announced a merger with Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton€™s that led to a controversy over the practice of €œtax inversions€ (more on that later), but there€™s more to Burger King than a desire to pay less in taxes, some of it pretty weird.

Contributor

Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'