When we think about fast food burgers most think about McDonald’s as the primary burger franchise. But the second one that most often comes to our mind would probably be Burger King. They have a worldwide presence just like McDonald’s and they are quite comparable in many ways.

I checked up in their origins and here is what I found out.

In Jacksonville, Florida back in 1953 there was a restaurant called Insta-Burger King. The word “Insta” came from their use of the broiler they used to cook their burgers on, called the Insta-Broiler. Kieth J. Kramer and Matthew Burns opened this restaurant and found that the Insta-Broiler was very successful at cooking burgers and they wanted all their future franchises to make use of this piece of equipment.

In 1959 the company was sold to by Miami, Florida franchisees James McLamore and David R. Edgerton who renamed the company to Burger King. They successfully grew the company to over 250 locations in the United States and they finally ended up selling the company to Pillsbury Company in 1967. In comparison, McDonald’s had almost 1,000 locations in the United States at that time. Their franchising model was somewhat different than McDonald’s since Burger King had very little oversight and control of its franchises and that let to issues with product quality and store image.

The franchise model remained into place until 1978 when Burger King hired McDonald’s executive Donald N. Smith to help revamp the company. He introduced many policies but the various owners until 2000 neglected many of the policies and allowed the company to go into an image and financial slump. In 2001 Burger King was forced to enter into Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to heavy debt (almost 300 million dollars).

In 2002 a trio private equity companies purchased Burger King out of bankruptcy for $1.5 billion dollars. They managed to revitalize Burger King so that between 2004 and 2009 the company managed to have consecutive profitable quarters.

The slowing economy from 2007-2010 did however decline Burger King’s business unlike McDonald’s that managed to grow their business in the same period.

Today Burger King is the world’s second largest hamburger franchise after McDonald’s. At the end of FY 2009 Burger King was employing 41,000 employees and had total revenue of 2.54 Billion Dollars. In comparison McDonald’s has 400,000 employees and total revenue of $27 Billion dollars or around 10 times as much as Burger King.