Can Burger King Sustain Momentum? It Starts with What’s Still Left to Do

Siddiqui, RBI’s CFO, and former president of Popeyes, speaking at the Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference, said his response hasn’t changed much, year-over-year. But it has shifted a bit.

The company, as you’d guess, gets a lot of asks about Burger King’s U.S. business, which represents about 17 percent of RBI’s operating income. Those still dominate the conversation. Yet people have begun progressing from questioning when a turnround will come to if it’s sustainable.

Burger King sales growth

Burger King U.S. in Q2 posted same-store sales growth of 8.5 percent (10 percent two-year stack). That outpaced the larger QSR burger field by north of 9 percentage points. And it followed a Q1 result of 5.8 percent (4.7 percent two-year).

The narrative for Burger King throughout Reclaim the Flame, which turned four years old on September 9, is none of it was flash-in-the-pan devised. It was structural and ran more than $2 billion, covering areas from marketing to store assets to, more recently, core upgrades of its Whopper and nuggets.

Siddiqui said RBI’s answer splits between what’s happened over those four years and what’s left. With remodels, just a shade over 50 percent of the system has updated (more here on how those are performing). Meaning, naturally, close to half of the fleet has yet to tap into the sales bump witnessed in other parts of the business.

Of elevated stores disclosed via Burger King’s 2026 FDD, 964 underwent a full remodel and 67 scrape and rebuilds. The average sales uplift was double-digits for each, but north of 25 percent for demolished restaurants.

Full remodels appreciated an 11.9 percent average sales uplift, while scrape and rebuilds were at 26 percent. Stores that underwent a conversion to a double drive-thru observed average sales hikes of 16.8 percent (10.6 percent without).

And restaurants that fixed from legacy to “modern image” posted average sales growth of 13.8 percent. Units from Burger King’s “20/20 Light” to a new look achieved 10.2 percent.

Lastly, Burger King’s most-present update—the “Sizzle” design—resulted in upticks of 14.9 percent.

Refranchising efforts

Simply, Siddiqui’s point is not a hollow one. The other corner of runway ahead is refranchising. Burger King has about 1,000 stores still to place in the “hands of the right operators,” he said.

The brand took on a massive crop of corporate stores in early 2024 when it spent $1 billion to acquire its largest operator in Carrols. The goal being to sell those units back to smaller operators, and, ultimately, shift the company-run portfolio to a steady state level of about 300 locations. It was 1,100 last year.

Burger King dealt the first batch ahead of schedule and said the latter half of 2026 would mark a ramp-up phase, with 2027 gathering speed.

Again, Burger King has a ways to go. And like remodels from a more holistic view, the brand feels one of the reasons it’s enjoyed success of late is a “halo effect” where, from the look of stores to how they perform to the quality and consistency of products, customers are changing their perception of Burger King. It’s no longer a tired system.

Siddiqui said the brand is selling more Whoppers now since upgrading the bun, mayo, and packaging. Whopper platform AUVs have climbed more than 20 percent since that campaign began in February.

Siddiqui said, in addition to nuggets, there are more core products for Burger King and Head Chef Amy Alarcon to elevate. “And build on that latent brand love for Burger King,” he said.

“So, I get excited, because I know we’re still in early innings, and there’s so much opportunity on the horizon that we will continue,” Siddiqui added. “We feel good about continuing to be able to drive results there.”

As for the other side of the opening question, Siddiqui said analysts tend to focus too narrowly on RBI’s individual concepts. But the aggregate of the company spreads to more than 100 countries. It’s a wide-ranging horizon.

Having multiple brands under one house and roof, he explained, from procurement synergies to talent and the ability to move people around (like Siddiqui’s ladder, which traversed Asia-Pacific development to Popeyes to corporate again), enables RBI to lead with a plug-and-play growth model.

For instance, Popeyes, not all that long ago, was a relatively immaterial international QSR. When RBI acquired it for $1.8 billion in 2017, there were more than 2,600 stores in the U.S. and 25 other countries. That included about 475 international restaurants and less than $300 million in systemwide sales.

Today, Popeyes is a top 10 western QSR business globally with over 1,800 international locations, more than $1.7 billion in systemwide sales, and nearly 40 percent growth in 2025 on top of 50 percent the prior year.

“But I think you step back a little bit, the journey we’ve been on with Burger King has been fantastic,” Kobza said. “It’s been a multi-year thing. We had to go and we had to fix a lot of the fundamentals. We had to do work on the assets. I think [U.S. and Canada brand president] Tom [Curtis] and the rest of the team did an awesome job really improving the baseline level of consistency of operations within Burger King. And you saw that in every metric we look at over the last three to four years.”

It’s been a program of bolstering fundamentals to set the stage for marketing and product elevation. And that, reiterating Siddiqui’s point, really only began in 2026.

Kobza said Burger King has improved, “but it can be much, much better.” There’s a calendar built out covering a “couple of years” of menu updates that’s going to take time to cycle through.

“There are still places where there are old Burger Kings, and we still to work through that,” he said. “And there are still places where I think we can operate even better and even more consistently in certain patches of the country. … We still have a number of years to go in this journey, but it’s really fun to see some of the payoff happening so far.”

Throughout, Burger King has had to get franchisees to buy in and trust the system.

It’s difficult to move on changes, Kobza said, if operators don’t see a line of sight to profitability.

An undersold story, he shared, of when former Domino’s CEO Patrick Doyle joined the company in November 2022, was RBI began publishing franchisee profitability metrics every year. It’s one of the few publicly traded restaurant companies to do so.

And RBI started putting franchisee profitability in corporate employees’ bonus targets.

Kobza said that creates alignment. “People know that we’re going to be publicly held accountable to what’s happening with the franchisees’ profitability,” he said. “And our team’s economic outcomes are tied to the franchisees’ economic outcomes. Incentives aren’t the only thing. There is a lot to the relationships. After we did that, we’ve built trust through cycles.”

Burger King grew average franchisee profitability per unit from $125,000 to about $205,000 in 2023 and 2024. The figure sank to $185,000 in 2025 because of rising beef costs. But, RBI noted, if external factors were removed, operators made more money that year versus the prior.

“You need to be growing in the same direction,” Kobza said. “People all need to be excited about the plan and the elements, and that’s what allows you to deliver big results like we’re seeing in some of our businesses today.”

The value landscape, and brand targets

Brand targets and value

The larger theme for Burger King over these past four years was DNA rooted. Stay true to flame grilling the Whopper and what’s separated the chain from peers, but figure out how to make everything about it better and more relevant.

Doyle has a saying inside RBI: “The best test you can give yourself is for the core guest. Are you making the experience on the product better this year than it was last year?”

“If you’re doing that, you’re probably going to grow your sales and traffic,” Kobza said. “And so, we keep that test in our minds as kind of a litmus of whether we’re working on the right things and whether we’re making progress.”

Part of that equation is value, especially amid a guest dynamic where visits remain fleeting. Kobza said the topic will always key QSR. It tends to run through levels of prominence, though, in terms of media. He feels those outward fluctuations are bigger than actual business variations. Or, phrased differently, it’s not always the red alarm you read about.

If you look at the value mix within RBI’s U.S. burger business, it’s about 30 percent. That, Kobza said, doesn’t change much yearly beyond a point or two, one direction or the other.

“And it is important to have,” he explained. “But it can’t be your whole strategy.”

That’s why RBI’s perspective has been to work on premium offerings, too. Strengthen the core. Make sure value is daily, consistent, and clear. “People want to know that when they go to one of your concepts, they’re going to have access to a certain price point, a certain value construct,” he said.

Additionally, from an efficiency standpoint, RBI wants to avoid educating guests on new value architectures every “few months.”

“It’s expensive to do that,” Kobza said. “So, the best kind of place you can get to is where you have something that’s consistent over time, where you create the awareness of this construct and then you stick with it and you don’t have to overinvest media. And you can invest some of that media in other places of your business.”

This is where RBI worked to get to, although it varies by brand. Where Burger King has a $5 Duo and a $7 Trio, Tim Hortons examines value through the lens of everyday price. Loyal coffee drinkers show up four or five times per week. Thus, they seek consistent value and personalized app offers.

And speaking of Tims, Siddiqui called it “one of the best restaurant businesses … anywhere in the world.” He said Canadaian drive-thrus, from 6 to 10 a.m., move cars through “every like 23 seconds.”

Canadian same-store sales expanded 0.1 percent in Q3 (3.7 percent two year) and have posted positive for 21 consecutive quarters. Siddiqui said Tims is focused on an impactful marketing calendar, like its Harry Potter partnership earlier in the year. (A look at U.S. growth in recent years).

The brand recently introduced matcha and hopes to lift afternoon sales alongside more cold innovation. About half of its business happens before 11 a.m.

Siddiqui explained there are some early indictors business is improving. And while he knows people like to draw parallels to Burger King’s comeback, there are stark differences.

For one, Popeyes’ franchise system, he said, is fundamentally healthy from a balance sheet perspective. Just a few years ago, the brand’s average four-wall profitability was more than $300,000 per box. That’s come down since but operators are making money and their leverage remains under control. That was not the case at Burger King.

Secondly, the vast majority of Popeyes, thanks to accelerated growth post-sale, were built in the last 10–15 years. Burger King’s average was 30-plus years when Reclaim the Flame kicked in.

Siddiqui said this reality dictates capital requirements for franchisees to get things on track (in a positive sense).

Brand president Peter Perdue, a former Burger King COO named to the role last November, worked closely with Curtis and picked up pages of his playbook. Consistency in value, operations, and core menu are the principles of what Popeyes will focus on.

One of the first things Perdue did, roughly nine months or so ago, was introduce a $5 Faves menu Popeyes has stuck with since. Siddiqui said value for money perception improved 3 points, year-over-year.

And like Burger King, Popeyes expanded field resources and added more touchpoints for restaurants and franchisees. GMs started receiving more training. “A lot more hands-on field activity,” Siddiqui said.

“What you’re actually starting to see is guest complaints, which we track very closely, guest complaints are trending down in the Popeyes system,” Siddiqui said, “which is great to see. It’s an early sign that the turnaround is really underway.”

On execution, Perdue leaned into Popeyes three core platforms—bone-in chicken, tenders, and the sandwich that inspired category wars in summer 2019.

“We already know we have the best tasting product,” Siddiqui said. “But we want to be the best at executing that product.”

He said product satisfaction across those three buckets got better on a year-over-year basis. Altogether, RBI feels Popeyes is starting to find its way again. “It will, of course, take time,” Siddiqui said. “But I think this is fundamentally different than the Burger King turnaround.”

In both instances, bringing the system along is going to prove critical, Kobza said. You see that at Burger King today with an employee and operator prouder to serve a product they believe in in a restaurant they feel good about. “That changes the interaction at the point of sale,” he said. “And that’s going to change your sales and the effectiveness of all these new initiatives we’re doing.”