Fast Food Facts

A McDonald's Super Size meal (Big Mac, Super Size fries, and Super Size Coke) contained around 1,600 calories—requiring roughly 6-7 hours of walking to burn off.

McDonald's salads contain up to 60% more fat than their burgers!

The average American eats at McDonalds more than 1,800 times in their life.

In Australia, Burger King is called Hungry Jack's.

Over 5.75 million Whopper sandwiches are sold at Burger King every day—that's 2.1 billion a year!

The first Ronald McDonald was Willard Scott in 1963.

In 2007, a customer kindly gave a $10,000 tip to a Pizza Hut waitress after hearing she had financial troubles which had forced her to drop out of college.

Every day, 1% of the world's population is served at McDonald's.

The first McDonald’s drive-thru was opened near a military base in Arizona “to serve soldiers who weren’t permitted to get out of their cars while wearing fatigues.”

Instead of McDonald's tearing down a ~230-year-old Georgian mansion, citizens of a small NY town forced them to renovate it instead, resulting in a uniquely historic franchise location.

McDonald's serves 75 hamburgers every second, according to the company’s Operations and Training Manual.

Pharrell Williams was fired from three different McDonald's locations. His reason: "I was eating the chicken nuggets." Years later, McDonald's hired him to produce "I'm Lovin' It" — the most successful fast food jingle in history.

Dave Thomas learned the restaurant trade under Colonel Sanders at a KFC franchise in Indiana. His boss sent him to Columbus, Ohio to rescue four failing KFC stores. Thomas turned all four around and sold his 45% stake back to KFC for $1.5 million. He poured that money into a new burger chain. It was Wendy's.

McDonald's quietly owned 90% of Chipotle from 1998 to 2006. They invested $360 million and grew the chain from 16 to 500 restaurants. Then McDonald's pushed for drive-throughs. The founder said no. McDonald's sold for $1.5 billion. Chipotle is now worth $38 billion.

Howard Johnson's was once America's biggest restaurant chain. It had over 1,000 orange-roofed diners selling 28 flavors of ice cream and fried clams. In the 1960s it was bigger than McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC. The chain shrank for decades. Only one restaurant was left, in Lake George, New York. That last Howard Johnson's closed in 2022. Today there are zero left in America.