McDonald's has to be the all-time biggest rivalry in fast food, and I would even say among the biggest rivalries in any industry.

First off, even though they have been direct competitors going back to the 1950s, McDonald's has always been bigger.

They are like the original fast food icon as far as the system we know today, and no other hamburger place has ever even had a realistic chance of catching up to them.

But Burger King has traditionally been the closest.

The standings are typically McDonald's sitting their way in the lead, with Burger King at a distant second.

Number three, by the way, is usually Wendy's, though in 2012 they did briefly surpass Burger King in sales to take over that number two spot, so Wendy's has been a part of all this as well in different ways, but the rivalry there isn't quite as extensive as the other two.

Really, since McDonald's has always been so far ahead, most of the story here is about different ways that Burger King has been trying to catch up to them.

So, for this video, I'm going to try to tell the story of Burger King while highlighting ten notable examples from over the years where they attempted to gain ground on McDonald's by either following their lead or even by publicly attacking them, starting at the very beginning in 1953 with McDonald's being a founding influence.

See, that year, Keith Kramer teamed up with his father-in-law, Matthew Burns, to open a fast food restaurant in Florida.

It was centered around this new cooking device that they really believed in called the Insta Burger King.

The reason it's on my list here is because it is believed that they got the idea of starting a fast food restaurant after seeing the success of the original McDonald's.

I have to point out that this was before Ray Kroc when McDonald's was still completely unknown outside of Southern California, so the fact that they were already influencing a new restaurant opening on the other side of the country in Florida, I think is pretty amazing.

Even at this early stage, Burger King was following the lead of McDonald's, or should I say, Insta Burger King, which did grow into a chain and even introduced the iconic Whopper before experiencing financial difficulties in 1959.

And that leads me to the next item on my list, franchising.

James McLemore and David Edgerton were classmates at Cornell University that for the past five years had been franchisees of Insta Burger King.

Well, in 1959, they were able to take advantage of the company's poor condition and buy it from those original founders, and from that point, started making a bunch of positive changes.

Getting rid of that Insta broiler, replacing it with their now famous Flame broiler, and of course, getting rid of the Insta from the name as well and just calling it Burger King.

But maybe most importantly, they implemented this aggressive franchising program.

Now, McDonald's is famous for the way that they used a franchising model to effectively grow the chain by essentially having outside people pay McDonald's to open and operate new locations.

Many fast food restaurants were influenced by this, including Burger King, but in a much different way.

McDonald's was very careful about it, paying close attention to each individual franchisee, forcing each location to wear the same uniform, serve the same food, have the same prices, they forced everything to be extremely similar between locations, and that way, it didn't matter which McDonald's you went to, you would be getting the same experience.

Not quite the case with Burger King.

In an effort to grow quickly, they made agreements that sacrificed control.

The main idea was that the franchisee would buy the rights to open Burger King's in a specified territory, and once they held those rights, they could pretty much do whatever they wanted.

Meaning, throughout the 1960s well into the 1970s, unlike McDonald's, most Burger King's were very different from each other.

There was no consistent image, and the customers had no idea what to expect when they went to a new one.

Which predictably proved to be an issue that was addressed by their new owners, Pillsbury.

In 1967, when there were 274 very different Burger King's in operation, they were sold to Pillsbury for 18 million dollars.

I realize that might sound strange, but this deal was the start of this whole thing, where Pillsbury and their main competitor, General Mills, became heavily involved in the restaurant industry.

I have other videos about it if you want more details, but back to my list.

Getting away from franchising for a minute, in 1974, Burger King introduced, Have It Your Way, a famous McDonald's campaign that was introduced earlier in that same year.

You probably know it, it was a jingle about the ingredients on their Big Mac, two all beef patties, special sauce, that whole thing.

It kind of goes back to how everything was so uniform at McDonald's.

That song was listing what you would get on a Big Mac, so Burger King tried to expose that as a negative.

You know, trying to seem superior by advertising how if you go to Burger King, you can customize your orders your way.

Their campaign even featured their own catchy song, hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us, I'm singing way too much in this video.

They only used that campaign for a few years though, because they felt that it also reminded the customers of the wait times at Burger King from all of those customized orders.

But they did bring it back, because after all that time, they still considered it to be their most memorable slogan.

Alright, back to my list, in 1977, Donald Smith was a senior executive at McDonald's that was lured away by Burger King when they hired him as their new president and CEO.

And then he replaced most of Burger King's management team with people from McDonald's, who then worked together to implement changes to make the company operate much more like McDonald's.

Probably the biggest part of it was making the restaurants more similar to each other.

They created stricter franchising agreements, conducted unscheduled checkups of how they were operating things, the company even took control of some of those franchises.

Aside from the uniformity, they worked toward introducing a breakfast menu, similar to what McDonald's had recently done, and implemented some new cooking methods that were also similar to McDonald's.

By the 1980s, the changes were showing positive results, and that is where the rivalry really started heating up.

In 1982, McDonald's actually sued Burger King for some of their advertising claims.

It all started with a Burger King commercial for that year, coincidentally starring actress Sarah Michelle Gellar when she was 5 years old.

That one stands out because it was the first time either one of these two restaurants had ever mentioned each other by name in a commercial.

They made comparisons about the size of the burgers and how they were cooked, followed by other commercials with other claims involving taste tests, the specifics of which were challenged in the lawsuit that was ultimately settled.

But Burger King did get a lot of exposure from it, and it sparked these burger wars in the 1980s.

These wars started heating up again 2 years later, when McDonald's introduced the McDLT.

It was pretty much their response to the Whopper, with a bit of a twist, of course.

It was served in this special styrofoam container, with the food separated in two different sections, in an attempt to keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool.

It really just seems like a gimmick to me.

It was discontinued after less than a decade, I believe because of the negative impact that container was having on the environment, but this one does stand out as being one of the few times McDonald's was responding to Burger King.

But I still have it on this list, because Burger King addressed it with commercials directly talking about McDonald's and their McDLT, attempting to convince the viewer that the Whopper is superior.

So even though Burger King may have been the original in this case, they still took the opportunity to publicly insult McDonald's.

I think this next one is kind of funny.

The Bigger Whopper.

Only a year later, Burger King increased the size of their Whopper just slightly to 4.2 ounces, technically making it bigger than the Quarter Pounder over at McDonald's.

And you better believe that they spent 30 million dollars on an advertising campaign telling the public all about it.

This commercial right here went as far as to have two fast food employees crying that were meant to represent McDonald's and Wendy's upset about how their burgers were now comparatively smaller.

I mean, this was some pretty aggressive advertising.

However, that campaign wasn't at all successful, nor were any of them really at that point.

They even had the strange one called Where's Herb about this guy who had never had a Whopper before.

I don't know.

But toward the end of the 1980s, Burger King wasn't doing too well because I think anyone would agree that McDonald's was the one to come out ahead in these burger wars.

In 1989, all of Pillsbury was bought by Grand Metropolitan, who was a very large British company mostly known for their involvement in the liquor business.

It was this messy takeover where Pillsbury was actually trying to divest Burger King as a way to prevent it from happening.

But it did happen, and less than a decade later, that company merged with Guinness to create this really big liquor company called Diageo.

During the 1990s, under their ownership, the primary strategy they implemented for Burger King was to improve their menu, dropping a bunch of lower-selling items, making the higher-selling ones bigger and better tasting, and introducing new ones.

The two biggest introductions of the 1990s were the BK Broiler in 1990, but more relevant here would be the Big King in 1997.

This right here, without a doubt, was their long-awaited response to the Big Mac.

It doesn't have that extra bun in the middle, but the rest of the ingredients are pretty much the same.

It was originally tested as the Double Supreme, but of course, when it was launched nationally, it was given the name Big King, I would assume to remind people of the Big Mac.

When it was introduced, again, the commercials directly mentioned McDonald's, attempting to convince the viewer that the Big King is superior by pointing out how it's like a and has 75% more beef.

And then, to go along with this, another major menu change just a few months later was when they introduced their new fries.

I guess they started treating them with potato starch, and that somehow forms a crispy coating, I don't know how it works, but they introduced them with a big 70 million dollar advertising campaign that included the cost of licensing Mr. Potato Head, that was mostly centered around how the new fries were better than the fries at McDonald's.

The crispy new Burger King fries beat McDonald's fries in a nationwide taste test.

All of this did appear to help Burger King gain some ground on McDonald's, but it wasn't very much, and it was short-lived anyway.

From there, Burger King has gone through a bunch of management and ownership changes.

In 2002, they were sold to Texas Pacific Group for 1.5 billion dollars so Diageo could better focus on their core business.

Four years later, they became publicly owned.

Four years after that, they were bought by 3G Capital, a private equity firm, for over 3 billion dollars, and four years after that, they merged with Tim Hortons to create Restaurant Brands International.

Going back to the list, the final thing I want to mention is the McWhopper.

Maybe you remember this one, because it happened in 2015.

Burger King took out these full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, asking McDonald's to join up with them.

They wanted to team up to open a restaurant for one day in Atlanta, which is between the two companies' headquarters, and sell a burger that was a mixture of the Big Mac and the Whopper.

It would have been for charity, they wanted it to be an international day of peace, seemingly as a gesture of good faith, ending this feud between them.

Probably again more of a gimmick than anything, but none of it matters anyway, because McDonald's wasn't interested, none of it ever happened, so I suppose the rivalry continues.

Let me know in the comments, what do you think of Burger King, and how do they compare to McDonald's?

Which one do you prefer to go to, which one has the better food, which company is better?

Obviously, McDonald's has been the more significant one, but Burger King has done some notable things to make their own mark as well.

To me, it seems unlikely, but do you think Burger King will ever pull ahead, or maybe even fall behind Wendy's again?

And any other thoughts you have about Burger King, McDonald's, or anything else I talked about in this video, leave them in the comments.

I'd like to hear what you have to say.

Thank you for watching.