Burger King on Wednesday reported a strong start to 2026, with 5.8% same-store sales growth in its key U.S. market, a number that the company said bested the fast-food sector by about 500 basis points.
The fast-food chain has been outperforming rivals for most of the past three years. But the strong start, which bested longtime rival McDonald’s by some 190 basis points, proved that brands do not actually need all that many discounts to lure customers in this environment.
They just need to show people that they’re doing the right things inside their restaurants: Improve the way the burgers are made, make the stores look good, and give customers good service.
Consumers today are getting picky, as evidenced by the wide range of performance by different brands. Popeyes, Burger King’s sister chain, reported a 6.5% decline in same-store sales, a ridiculous 1,230-basis-point gap in performance. Or look at Sweetgreen, which just reported a 12.8% decline in same-store sales.
And that makes sense. After all, if you are cutting back on something, say, desserts, you want to make sure that dessert is fantastic when you do imbibe. The restaurant business is the same way. Lower-income consumers are visiting restaurants less frequently, so when they do visit they want something great.
That makes operations super important in a market like this. More important than low prices.
Yet for Burger King, the brand’s outperformance is a long—long—time coming. The company has underperformed its rivals for decades. It spent much of that time focused on discounts.
During the Great Recession, the brand’s executives insisted on matching McDonald’s $1 Double Cheeseburger with their own, except that Burger King’s Double Cheeseburger was fundamentally more expensive and lost money for operators.
And even through different management teams and different owners, the brand would shift back to discount marketing as a fallback whenever its strategies didn’t work. That happened in 2021, after the company’s infamous Ch’King failure. Those discount levels helped push operators into financial ruin.
More to the point, however, the company’s focus on discounts and its overt reliance on heavy fast-food users—read: young men—kept volumes to a minimum, damaged profitability and kept franchisees from upgrading locations.
When Burger King President Tom Curtis joined the company in 2021, the average age of the chain’s restaurants was 30 years. “We had serious work to be done,” Patrick Doyle, executive chairman of Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International, said in an interview.
Burger King honestly cannot afford to compete on value right now. It has less than half the unit volumes of McDonald’s, for instance, and its franchisees generate low profitability. That has put pressure on management to find ways to get customers in without relying on the kinds of discounts that many of its rivals are using to get customers.
The company has instead spent a lot of money to fix the brand. RBI spent $1 billion to buy out Carrols Restaurant Group, the 1,000-unit operator. It spent an initial $400 million on the “Reclaim the Flame” comeback plan,” then added another $300 million. Do the math and that’s $1.7 billion.
But that is roughly the going rate for fixing a legacy, franchised burger chain that spent decades shuffling through ownership and management while failing to mount a true competitive threat to McDonald’s.
In focusing on operations and remodels, the company got stores ready. It is spending this year upgrading its menu while Curtis talked to 1,500 customers about their views on Burger King. And now it’s telling people about all the changes, which should get people coming back.
We asked Doyle whether he felt vindicated by the results, which play into his strategy of improving store-level operations and profitability above all else. “It’s absolutely amazing,” he said. “Look, we believed in it. We’ve seen things getting better. This was the big unveil, right? It’s gotten better, and we’re pretty excited about where we are and what the future holds.”
To be sure, it’s not as if Burger King doesn’t have some discounts on its menu. It has $5 Duos and $7 Trios, for instance. It also prices Whoppers at $3.99 every Wednesday to get customers in the door.
Consumers do need some value, whether anybody likes it or not. But for Burger King, this is a relative minimal amount of discounts, and it’s a lot less than that given by its rivals.
Instead, it got traffic the way brands should get traffic: By getting customers excited about coming in.