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No wonder he’s an Iron Chef. Michael Symon‘s Cleveland burger joint B Spot is barely four months old but he was judged winner of the People’s Choice Award Thursday at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival Burger Bash. Symon’s “Fat Doug” burger was topped with pastrami, Swiss cheese and slaw. Runner up was Bobby Flay [...]

Carrols Restaurant Group executives alternately praised and slammed Burger King marketing and product-development strategies in explaining to analysts why the 312 BK restaurants it operates posted a 2.6% decline in same-store sales last year. President-COO Dan Accordino applauded BK’s announced intention to focus on breakfast in 2010, saying the plans include introductions of a BK Breakfast Bowl [...]

Quick-service restaurants’ advertising spending increased 1.3% in 2009 while overall ad outlays fell 9.0% to $36.1 billion according to new data from The Nielsen Company. Advertising by full-service restaurants declined 3.6% during the year. Total ad spending felt the impact of sharp declines by automakers (-23.4%) and auto dealerships (-23.0%). QSRs were one of only [...]

Wendy’s today finally made it official, formally introducing the Bacon & Blue cheeseburger on its home page after testing the innovative burger for more than six months. It’s the first blue-cheese-topped burger from a national quick-service chain. The rollout follows Wendy’s CEO Roland Smith’s advisory to analysts last month that the chain would add the new [...]

► Free Coke glass? It’s a familiar promotion, and McDonald’s is running that now in Austria. But in Germany, the Arches are modernizing that hoary tactic and giving customers a free coffee cup (at right) with purchase of a McCafé meal or McMenu combo. Which will be the first chain to adopt this in the [...]

Red Robin Gourmet Burgers is accelerating new-product development—including introduction of its first patty melt—and marketing spending this year in an attempt to boost brand awareness and, of course, sales. That’s important given the chain’s announcement that 2009 revenues decreased 3.1% in 2009 as company-owned same-store sales dove 11.1% for the year. As predicted here last month, [...]

How real is the widely accepted $4 limit on what consumers are comfortable paying for a quick-service menu item? Real enough that it factored into Jack in the Box’s surprising 11.1% decline in same-store sales for the quarter ended Jan. 17, 2010. In a conference call today, Jack in the Box Chairman-CEO Linda Lang told [...]

[Update: Miss BK Joe? Click here for a company that says it ships BK Joe/Douwe Egberts coffee.] House brands are nice; national brands are better. That’s what Burger King apparently decided in throwing its home-grown BK Joe coffee brand under the bus in order to take up with Starbucks-owned Seattle’s Best Coffee as it battles for [...]

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hatzQWhLX4c ► Happy Chinese New Year, which shared yesterday with St. Valentine’s Day. You golfers will want to know that it’s the Year of the Tiger. For you burger lovers in Singapore, McDonald’s is celebrating New Year’s with the Double Prosperity Burger and this commercial (at left). Is it a bad sign that not even the [...]

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TusNtct9oTY A cessation of hostilities during the Olympics is a tradition more honored in spirit than in fact, but McDonald’s steps back from the so-called “burger wars” today and celebrates the neutrality and popularity of Chicken McNuggets with a Twitter-based promotion as the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games get under way. As reported here in December, McDonald’s [...]

[May 17: Burger King introduced Fire-Grilled Ribs. Read the story here.] Burger King Chairman-CEO John Chidsey tells the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Ziobro that the chain is testing several strategies to wean consumers off the $1 Double Cheeseburger, a promotion that ends its six-month run in April. Two scenarios are: ● Adding a new low-price [...]

[Update: The CBO finally makes it to the U.S. in October 2012 but in a different form. Read about it here.] [Update: The CBO is back in the UK but renamed the BCO. What happened? Go here.] McDonald’s has introduced its bacon-laden CBO (Chicken, Bacon, Onion) sandwich to its menu in the United Kingdom after moving [...]

Burger King’s new line of 7-oz. XT (extra thick) burgers comes out under the Steakhouse name. The three-item line, rolling out this month, extends from a Steakhouse XT to a Smoky Cheddar Steakhouse XT and A.1. Steakhouse XT. Merchandising materials label the Smoky Cheddar version a limited-time member of the menu. In doing so, Burger [...]

Remember Mondays when your teachers were tired, too, and they just showed movies until the bell rang? This is one of those Mondays. Let’s watch commercials. ► A week ago, BurgerBusiness suggested that Jack in the Box hadn’t given up on the Grilled Sandwiches it has been testing since fall. And sure enough, Jack rolled [...]

[8/30/ Update: BK is teing a Jalapeno Cheddar Stuffed XT burger. Details here.] Burger King Chairman-CEO John Chidsey this week told analysts that the chain is considering putting stuffed burgers alongside the Whoppers on its menu. That would truly be something new for QSR burger chains, which lately have been reviving patty melts as they [...]