Top 10 Fast Food Scandals
#10: BK Horse Meat
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Did you hear the one about the man who walks into a bar, and the bartender says “why the long face?” The man replies “because I just ate a Whopper.” Okay, that’s not a real joke. But it sounds like one that could have been heard during a late night TV monologue back in 2013, when news broke that Burger King had been using horse meat in their hamburgers. The truth is that trace amounts of horse DNA were found in the meat facility which supplied Burger King. Luckily, testing done on BK burgers was negative for equine but it did come out that a handful of samples from the plant tested positive. The fast food chain claims that quality is a top priority, so let’s hope they follow through on that.
#9: One Too Many K’s
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In 2015, a Krispy Kreme location in the UK created a promotion that would allow clients to come in and decorate their own donuts. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with that - in fact, we love the idea of decorating donuts. The problem arose when they called the promotion the Krispy Kreme club. However, instead of spelling “club” with a “c”, they kept with the initials of their name and spelled it k.l.u.b. Which made the acronym for the event - that they even promoted right on their Facebook page - “KKK”. How no one looked at that and said “hold on a second” is beyond us. Needless to say they pulled the promotion and the company issued an apology.
#8: Starbucks Ice Poop
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In 2017, a BBC investigation took samples from three UK coffee chains: Costa Coffee, Caffe Nero, and Starbucks. The samples were taken from iced coffee drinks, as well as chairs, tables and trays at multiple branches. While you might expect certain bacteria to be found, given that they didn’t take swabs from the bathrooms, you probably wouldn’t expect feces to be one of them. But, alas that was the case. While “bacteria found in feces” was discovered on 7 out of 10 Costa Coffee samples, Nero and Starbucks did only a little better with 3 out of 10 poopy samples. Maybe it's just us, but we’d like our fecal bacteria on 0 out of 10 samples.
#7: The Wendy’s Finger
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While Rachel’s English trifle might have tasted like feet, we’d definitely prefer that over an actual body part making its way into our meal. In 2005, a woman at a Wendy’s in San Jose, California claimed that she found a severed finger in her chili. Following the incident, Anna Ayala did what many of us would do… she sued the company. However, prior to the incident, she also did something that most of us would never do: You guessed it, she planted the finger in her chili. An investigation revealed that Ayala had paid one of her coworkers $100 for his fingertip (which he had lost in an accident) in an attempt to defraud Wendy’s. There were very real consequences for this and Ayala went to prison for 4 years.
#6: Papa John Is Papa Gone
In 2018, the Papa John’s pizza chain went without its papa. John Schnatter, the founder of the company and the titular Papa John was removed from his office at the company headquarters in July. Don’t feel bad though. The move came shortly after Schnatter had resigned from the company following reports that he had used a racial slur during a conference call just a few months prior. This, however, was just the tip of the scandal-iceberg for Schnatter who, in 2017, made headlines when he blamed slow pizza sales on the NFL Players kneeling during the National Anthem. The ingredients and the pizza might be better, but the founder sure wasn’t.
#5: Protesting McDonalds
In 1986, a few protesters who were part of an environmental organization known as London Greenpeace, began distributing anti-McDonald’s leaflets around London. The leaflets, titled “What's wrong with McDonald's? Everything they don't want you to know” attacked the company on multiple issues - including animal cruelty, environmental destruction and low wages. Needless to say Mickey D’s was none to happy about this, and they sued 5 members of the group in what would become known as the McLibel case. The case spent over 10 years in the courts and, while the final judgment did rule in favor of McDonald’s on many counts, the judge also ruled that some of the protesters' claims were true. We’re sure McDonald’s wasn’t Ba Da Ba Ba Bah, lovin’ that.
#4: Taco Bell’s Mystery Meat
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Taco Bell has encouraged its customers to “think outside the bun” but, according to a lawsuit filed back in 2011, they should have been encouraging us all to think outside the meat. The lawsuit claimed that Taco Bell shouldn’t be allowed to call what it put in its creations “beef” because it found that only about 35% actually was, with the rest being fillers of one kind or another. Taco Bell, as you might imagine, vehemently denied the allegations and eventually the class action suit was pulled. Still, the company’s argument against the 35% claims was that their stuff was actually 88% beef. Is it just us or is that still about 12 percentage points lower than it should be?
#3: BK Women Belong in the Kitchen
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As of 2021, Burger King had a very worthy and positive goal to empower more women to pursue the culinary arts. In accordance with said goal, they launched a scholarship program to help female employees of the chain reach their chef dreams. If you’re wondering why you never heard about it, it may be because of how they announced the program on Twitter. While the second and third tweets in the thread described the scholarship program and goals, the first tweet read as follows: “Women belong in the kitchen.” Turns out Burger King isn’t just the home of the Whopper, it’s also the home of terrible social media managers.
#2: McDonalds’ Hot coffee
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You might not recognize the name Stella Liebeck, but you probably know who she is. Liebeck is the woman who sued McDonald’s after spilling hot coffee on herself. She’s often been portrayed as the butt of a joke, someone trying to make some easy money, but the truth is a little different. The McDonald’s coffee she accidentally spilled on herself wasn’t just hot, it was somewhere bettween 180–190 °F. And it didn’t just burn her, it third-degree burned her, requiring skin grafts and 8 days in the hospital - followed by two more years of treatment. And as far as money goes, all she initially asked for was $20,000 to cover her medical expenses. It wasn’t until McDonald’s refused that she sued them for gross negligence.
#1: Bad Jared
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From 2000 to 2015, it was almost impossible to be a consumer of television and not know who Jared Fogel was. Fogel had lost over 200 pounds while at University in the 90s and part of his diet plan involved walking to Subway for meals. Well, Subway loved that story and they loved Jared so much that they made him a prime spokesperson for the company, putting him in over 300 commercials in that 15 year span. Everything seemed to be going well for Fogel and Subway, until an FBI investigation led to Jared’s arrest on charges involving minors. Fogel was sentenced to just under 16 years, and is currently doing all his walking in the Federal Correctional Institution, Englewood in Colorado.
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