40% Agree This Is The Best Sandwich At Burger King
Among fast food retail analysts, Burger King has a reputation for putting lots of energy into targeting the younger generations by coming up with irreverent, if gimmicky, one-off marketing campaigns, and in relatively rapid-fire succession (per CNN). "They've really focused a lot on marketing, product development, and menu innovation," GlobalData Retail's Managing Director, Neil Saunders told CNN of the fast food giant. More to the point, when Burger King has pulled back on such efforts, such as it did in 2021, it found itself falling behind Wendy's (via Forbes), which has since taken over as McDonald's closest competitor. But a survey conducted by Mashed has revealed what looks to be a rather perplexing paradox.
We asked U.S. readers of Mashed to identify what they think of as the best non-burger sandwich from Burger King. The choices we offered were between two oldies and two relative novelties, which we'll get to in just a bit. Based on the above, we figured that one of the novelties would surely be the winner. However, of the 652 people who responded, a full 40% agree that the best non-burger sandwich at Burger King is not a recent product innovation at all, but rather one that has been a Burger King stalwart for literally decades. Nevertheless, it wasn't the oldest menu item in our survey. That one came in dead last.
Burger King fans love a classic sandwich, but not too too classic
Burger King Whoppers are as delicious as they are for some fascinating reasons, but for the moment, we need to talk about Burger King's non-burger sandwich selection, of which there are essentially only four. There's the Original Chicken Sandwich, the Big Fish, the Ch'King sandwich, and the Spicy Ch'King. We surveyed U.S. readers as to which of these they deem the best, and somewhat to our surprise, given Burger King's tendency to lean into menu innovation, per CNN, a whopper-ing 40.04% voted for the Original Chicken. Yes, we're talking about the decidedly basic old-school lightly-breaded but not particularly crispy chicken sandwich on a rather generic sesame seed bun that you see pictured above. Introduced in the late 1970s, according to En-Academic, it came along only after the 60s-decade introduction of the first fish sandwiches available at Burger King. Now, known as the "Big Fish," it came in dead last with a mere 16.19% of the votes.
The second best sandwich at Burger King according to our 652 respondents is the Spicy Ch'King which got 26.87% of the votes and is a spicier version of the original Ch'King. The Spicy Ch'King was trailed, and by some distance, by the original non-spicy version of the Ch'King sandwich. With just 16.90% of the votes, this not-quite-an-original got just barely more love than the OG of Burger King non-burger sandwiches, the Big Fish.