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 McDonalds was successful enough to inspire imitators, so by the 1950s, thanks to franchises such as Carls 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 Keiths 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 McDonalds, 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 companys signature product, the Whopper, to the menu. Ranked third on QSR Magazines list of global fast food franchises (behind Subway and McDonalds), 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 BKs majority owner, having paid $4 billion for the company in 2010. In 2014, 3G announced a merger with Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons that led to a controversy over the practice of tax inversions (more on that later), but theres more to Burger King than a desire to pay less in taxes, some of it pretty weird.