ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Burger King, the first restaurant company to adopt analytics in the form of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. The setting is the heights of the hamburger wars during the mid-1970s and mid-1980s when Burger King was aggressively attempting to take market share from the market leader McDonald’s. Although Burger King was founded in 1953, two years before McDonald’s, it found itself lagging as consumer preferences for fast food changed in increasingly health conscious societies in which more families opted to eat out than ever before. In addition to being subservient to a parent company whose main line of business was not restaurants, Burger King management had to maintain a productive relationship with their franchisees. Burger King’s strategies to increase its market share could only be implemented if the restaurants could service the projected increases in customer counts while maintaining a “sales building posture.”.
