CJN 777
Mid-term assignment
The background of BURGER KING Holdings
Burger King Holdings is the parent company of Burger King, also known as Burger King Corporation, abbreviated BKC, a Delaware corporation formed on July 23, 2002. The company operates approximately 40 subsidiaries globally that oversee franchise operations, acquisitions, and financial obligations such as pensions. Burger King has limited approval over franchise operations such as minimum hours of operation and promotional pricing. It was last bought in 2010 by 3G Capital of Brazil in a deal worth $3.26bn. Now, it has more than 12,400 outlets in 73 countries, of which 66% are US-based. In 1997, they opened the first restaurant in Aldershot and the BURGER KING UK now has over 500 stores across the UK & Ireland employing over 25,000 people. BURGER KING® UK is one of the company’s top 3 markets in EMEA. They sell around one million burgers a week. In the UK and Ireland all BURGER KING® restaurants are owned and operated by independent franchisees. They are a 100% franchisee-owned business. In the UK, Burger King is the second largest fast food restaurant (Burger King Company).
On 10 December 2012, Investigations by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) resulted in Ireland being the first EU state to report and make public the presence of horse meat in beef (Steven Swinford, 2013). That was the beginning of the horse meat scandal. Burger King was involved in this scandal because the products that contained horse meat were manufactured by Silvercrest on behalf of Tesco which was the supplier of Burger King. First the Burger King saying that “BKW is fully aware of the issue concerning FSAI tests into beef burgers supplied to supermarkets by Silvercrest, a subsidiary of APB, and we are confident that the burgers supplied to UK and Irish BURGER KING® restaurants are not affected by these reports.” (Burger King, 2013). But later, they admit that in their food there was mixed a litter horse meat with the beef. The things were getting worse that in 18th February; Burger King’s twitter account was hacked on Tuesday after midnight. The hackers replaced the account’s profile photo with its rival’s golden arches, used Fish McBites as the header – the same as McDonald’s uses for its Twitter account. What did Burger King do and what the customer think about that. After the Food Safety Authority of Ireland said beef burgers with traces of equine DNA, including one product classed as 29% horse, was being supplied to supermarkets by Silvercrest Foods, subsidiaries of the ABP Food Group, Burger King immediately released a statement to say their burgers were not related to those burgers. The reasons they gave that the Silvercrest only supplied them 100% beef form British and Irish, the horse meat came from Portland. Looking at all the reasons they offered, we can see that they were all round the same mission: our food is high quality and without any other things added which don’t show in the menu. At that moment, the people who had left a message were divided into two parts. One part of them still doubted the facticity of Burger King’s words. And the other part support Burger King to launching an investigation into this matter to clear itself. On 17th January, ten million suspect burgers were taken off the shelves, including by retailers Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland and Dunnes Stores. (Nick Collins, 2013). What Burger King did when they notice this was to replace all Silvercrest products in UK & Ireland with other supplier which they didn’t name. Burger King emphasized that was a voluntary and precautionary measure and what they had used before was 100% beef. On 26th January, there was a good news came from Burger King’s press release, the Irish Department of Agriculture (DOA) confirmed that tests of BURGER KING® product produced by Silvercrest, a subsidiary of ABP Foods, have tested negative for equine DNA. In that statement, Burger King was confident