Which Burger Franchise Do South Africans Love Most?

Being a South African lover of food is a great thing. Not only do we get some incredible local brands to enjoy, but we also have the opportunity to (over)indulge in some big-name foreign franchises too. But, which is the best?

Brand Wars took 7 burger brands (both local and internationally available to the SA public) and put them to the test with a blind tasting. Over 30 different South African consumers rated the burgers, taking into account taste, value for money, and brand experience.

Here’s what they had to say:

Value for money

We wanted to know how a standard menu item Cheese Burger and Chips combo compared in terms of price.

So we ordered a single Cheese Burger (or nearest standard menu equivalent) and regular fries and compared the values of the order. We then took the average weight of the order, and ranked that too.

Both scores were totalled to arrive at the overall Value rankings.

Tastiest Burger in Town

We wanted to know who was the top of the taste ladder, so had a sampling team blind taste all orders and score them against each other.

We made sure they voted blind, made sure they were all regular burger eaters, and made sure none of them were Banting!

We ordered standard menu item Cheese Burger and Chips. and the meals were tasted and scored as a combination.

Best Product Presentation

We wanted to know how the brands matched up in terms of serving presentation.

We asked the testers to rate the visual appeal of the product presented based on garnish, sauce and firmness of the buns, and fries.

Then we asked the panel to rate the comparison between a published menu item visual and the actual product presented.

Brand Experience

We asked each order taker to rate the in-store experience from beginning to end.

This included individual ratings of touch-points such as the store atmosphere, staff representation and uniforms, in-store merchandising and order taking procedure. We included a note on if orders were taken as-is, or of staff attempted to up-sell to a larger size meal.

Finally we timed the order from the time we walked into the store, to the time we left the doors. (All orders were placed within 5 minutes of each other over a lunch time).

Overall Winner

So we took the combined scores from our #brandwars panels on Taste, Presentation, Brand Experience and Value for Money and did some number crunching to arrive at our result for the overall, best Take-Away burger experience in town right now.

Congratulations to all brands involved, and we look forward to seeing how the playing field changes the next time we pit burgers agains each other in the next edition of #burgerwars.