Burger King UK has almost doubled its whole system sales in the eight years since it first started as master franchisee here and its franchisees now want more sites.
Chief executive Alasdair Murdoch previously said that the company’s customer satisfaction levels are outperforming both KFC and McDonald’s, with a reduction in driver waiting times helping drive sales and focusing on poorer performing stores pulling it ahead of the market.
Murdoch has said the business is set to do “well north of £800m” in whole system sales this year – including both company and franchised stores.
Speaking at Propel’s Operational Excellence Conference, Murdoch said: “We’ve had fairly significant growth over the last few years. Our business has compounded at 10% a year since 2018, which means it will do well north of £800m this year (in whole system sales), and when we started, we were probably down at £440m or £450m.
Our total sales growth will, equally significantly, be more than 10%. When we started out in 2017, I think the Burger King business in the UK, historically, hadn’t been run, from a corporate level, very well.
There had been a succession of management changes over the prior 20 years and our franchisees had been really poorly managed. What we’ve set out to do is try to be consistent and constant with that.”
He added: We’ve grown a lot to get to 300 by buying a lot of our franchisees out, but what we’ve now got is I was rung up by MFG the other day – a growing franchisee of ours – and they were saying as many sites as you can give us, we’ll open.
We feel we’ve got it working for them, they’re able to make money and they’re reinvesting.”
Murdoch added that the company is no longer reliant on external hires, with two thirds of management roles filled internally.
Going on to say: “We had a big challenge post-covid like everyone did. We made a few really bad missteps, and hopefully we have learnt from those.
We were previously really reliant on external hires and I think we over-faced a lot of people – it wasn’t their lack of ability, we pushed them into those operations too quickly when they weren’t necessarily ready. We launched an accelerated fast track programme as a short-term fix as the turnover in our assistant manager population was far too high.
We ran the programme in 2022 and 2023 and then stopped to take a fresh approach to the whole talent pipeline. We launched a career pathways programme in 2025, and we now have a structured pathway which allows restaurant managers to seek out the best talent. Two in three of our manager roles are now filled internally.”
He concluded: “We are building 30 restaurants a year, and what you don’t want to be doing, as we have done in the past, is taking your best managers out of your best stores and put them into new places.
All you’re going to do is weaken your Ebitda over time. Our labour turnover is now down to 55%, which is quite a good number considering we employ around 14,000 people. This is a reduction of over 40% from 98% in May 2022, but we feel there is more work to be done in this area.”
