Burgermogging

Author

Andy Moore
March 06, 2026

Hello!

This week we’re talking:

  • The great restaurant CEO burger bite showdown

  • Blue Bottle Coffee’s sale

  • Wendy’s new role of Chief Tasting Officer, and more

One ask for you all: I’d like to start highlighting open corporate positions in the broader restaurant industry (chains, restaurant tech, distributors, vendors, etc). If you or your company are actively looking to fill a role and would like to reach +5,000 engaged industry folks each week, feel free to respond directly to this email with a link to the job description.

Onwards…

3 Numbers

$400 million

Price tag for Blue Bottle Coffee, which major Luckin Coffee backer Centurium Capital is reportedly purchasing from Nestlé. Per the original report from 36Kr, Centurium will buy Blue Bottle’s 100-cafe business, while Nestlé is holding onto the CPG segment. The deal puts Blue Bottle in the orbit of Luckin, which operates 31,000 shops globally and recently opened its first 9 U.S. locations. Luckin is already recruiting 'brand-oriented' candidates to prepare for integrating Blue Bottle into its portfolio.

98

Percentage of Black Rock Coffee Bar employees above barista-level who were promoted from within. The company opened 32 new locations last year — 21% net unit growth — and CEO Mark Davis connected the dots between the two on the company’s most recent earnings call, calling the internal pipeline the thing that’s “really made us a great growing company.”

$100k

Annual pay for Wendy’s new position of Chief Tasting Officer, or CTO (take that, Chief Technology Officers). The independent contractor role — which can be yours if your 60-second video best explains “why you NEED the opportunity of becoming Wendy’s Chief Tasting Officer” — involves creating promotional content for the chain, including taste-testing videos.

2 Big Stories

  1. McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of himself eating the new Big Arch, and then all hell broke loose this week. Via NBC News:

McDonald's and Burger King have a major beef — and not the kind sold in their restaurants.

The food fight started last month, when McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of himself eating the fast-food giant's new Big Arch burger on social media. The video was to promote the new product, which was released on Tuesday.

"That’s a big bite for a big arch!” Kempczinski said, holding up the burger with a negligible bite mark.

The video went viral for the apparent discrepancy. Social media users also started questioning if Kempczinski finished the burger for lunch as he said he would in the video.

Then on Tuesday, the day the Big Arch was released, Burger King posted a video of its president, Tom Curtis, eating its signature Whopper cheeseburger on Instagram.

"Thought we’d replay this," Burger King wrote in the caption.

The fast-food behemoth denied that the video was related to the spat.

"We can confirm that this video was not created in reaction to anything," a Burger King spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday. "While the timing may seem quick, the video was part of ongoing efforts to spotlight the recently elevated Whopper and Tom’s direct engagement with Guests."

Not to be outdone, Wendy’s U.S. President Pete Suerken appeared in a video in which he took an unprecedented four bites of his burger. I’ve also now seen Freddy’s CEO Chris Dull slamming a burger in his truck, and A&W Canada’s “CEO” — in reality, actor Allen Lulu — parodying the original Kempczinski video. It’s gotten to the point that, as one X user put it, restaurant CEOs are essentially reenacting the Patrick Bateman business card scene but with hamburger bites.

It was odd to see Kempczinski’s video go viral — when I wrote last year about formerly behind-the-scenes restaurant CEOs starting to put themselves out there more online, Kempczinski had been posting direct-to-camera videos for months, including taste tests of new items like the McCrispy Strips. The Big Arch video was actually posted to his LinkedIn a month ago; there, it barely made a ripple, garnering around a thousand likes and just over a hundred comments. Early this week, though, the video broke from LinkedIn/B2B containment, and it’s utterly dominated the restaurant news cycle since.

To their credit, McDonald’s is leaning into it all, posting on Tuesday, “take a bite of our new product.” And X user McFranchisee posted this week that they’ve sold a “SERIOUS amount Big Arch Burgers” because of the video. Perhaps Chris K was playing 10D chess all along.

  1. Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. targeted Starbucks and Dunkin’ at a recent rally, per Nation’s Restaurant News:

Can the federal government regulate the amount of sugar in restaurant chain menu items? This question has been brought up after U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently suggested to supporters at an “Eat Real Food” rally in Austin, Texas, that Starbucks and Dunkin’ should be held accountable for the high sugar content in some of their beverages.

“We’re going to ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s okay for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it,’” Kennedy said. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it.”

Neither Starbucks nor Dunkin’ have responded to RFK’s comments, which were delivered last week. But in a sign of today’s head-spinning political times, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey borrowed imagery from the Texas independence movement to post this response:

Other Headlines

Name That Chain!

You’ve got three guesses to name this week’s mystery chain:

  • Founded in 1997 by two friends baking out of a Las Vegas kitchen

  • Built an entire national chain around a single product format — one that most people associate with grandmothers and church potlucks

  • Has quietly grown to 600+ locations and was named America's Favorite Chain by Technomic two years in a row, beating out brands ten times its size

Find the answer at the bottom of the email…

#Content Recs

Power Moves

Here are some notable C-suite moves from the past week:

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next week.

NAME THAT CHAIN ANSWER: Nothing Bundt Cakes

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