Burger King is making another big move to attempt to breathe life back into the brand with a mass Burger King remodel of over 1,000 locations. The chain announced the plan: a $1 billion buy-out of their biggest franchisee, Carrol’s Restaurant Group to get the job done.
The Burger King Remodel Plan
With only 175 locations currently under the Burger King Corporation’s belt, this is a pretty big deal. Their largest franchisee, Carrol’s owns 1000 Burger King locations and 60 Popeye’s…and like a few other top franchise’s over the past few months, they will be selling every one.
The huge deal is expected to finalize in the springtime, and at that point, work will begin on remodeling 600 restaurants over a five-year period. Once completed, the Burger King Corp. will start selling the locations back to other franchisees.
Restaurant Brands CEO Josh Kobza elaborated on the remodel:
“This will allow us to really focus our attention on accelerating remodels and being thoughtful about how to refranchise this restaurant network into smaller packages, with new and existing franchisees who live close to the communities where they own the restaurants.”
It all started with the $400 million plan to Reclaim The Flame, another way to say…bail out a sinking ship. The money so far has been pumped into updating their image with advertising, upgrading technology, and focusing on the customer by making changes such as changing the tagline to “You Rule”.
This latest move seeks to take hold of the largest franchisee’s locations so the Burger King corporation can oversee the updating of the 1000+ restaurants personally.
However, many don’t think a remodel will do much to save the sinking ship. Commenters on the topic posted to Entrepreneur Reddit discussing the news:
“BK corporate’s thinking seems to be that remodeling stores and changing menu items are the issues — In my experience it’s the rushed service, dirty stores, and wrong orders that are the problem (partly due to either untrained or inadequately managed employees).”
As it’s been side time and again, Burger King may have a larger problem than just remodeling their physical locations, and upgrading technology…their sole focus at this point should be their most important job…delivering on quality food.
