10 Controversial Fast Food Commercials Through The Years

Some fast-food commercials live on long after their parent ad campaigns have ended, and that can be ideal for businesses when the commercials turned out to be funny or cute. However, it's not great when the commercial turns out to be a train wreck that makes the fast-food company regret the campaign. Companies may have had good intentions when they approved their ad agencies' proposals. However, poor timing, cultural differences, and simply not paying attention to what the ad implied have all led to commercials ending up in the "controversial" bin.

Most of the time, the company in question just apologizes and pulls the ad (Rarely, the company defends the campaign). Thanks to the wonders of the web, though, those ads are still around — hopefully serving as a reminder during new ad campaigns of just what can go wrong. Here are 10 controversial fast-food commercials that have amazed and shocked people throughout the years.

Let's start with Jack in the Box, which tried to be clever, but ended up being offensive. In 2018, the company released a commercial for its new Teriyaki Bowls. Right off the bat, "Jack" starts talking about having the "bowls" to do things differently. He also walks over to a table and stands behind it so that two of the bowls are right in front of him; take a guess where. What follows are a few seconds of various co-workers making bad puns about Jack's bowls. The commercial does suddenly switch to a very legal/HR-looking man stopping a film of the commercial and telling Jack he can't say that.

On its surface, this was just an ad full of bad puns. However, the company released the commercial during the #MeToo movement, so the testicle puns just didn't fly with part of the audience. Plus, there was the issue of comparing food to genitals, which was simply unappetizing. A lot of people actually found it funny and weren't offended, and some marketing companies noted that the controversy could give Jack in the Box a publicity boost. Others were aghast at the choice to use genital puns given the focus at that point in time on sexual harassment. Both Jack in the Box and its ad agency stood by the ad, claiming it had nothing to do with the #MeToo movement, but also stating that the companies were against harassment.

McDonald's tried to go the sentimental route in the U.K. with its 2017 commercial featuring a widowed mother and her son. The ad starts out in their home, with the son asking his mother what his father was like. Cut to the two walking through their idyllic town, hanging out in a playground and talking about the boy's dad. As the commercial goes on, you can see that the boy is noticing how he doesn't have things in common with his father, such as the boy's dirty shoes and terrible soccer/football kick while his mother talks about the dad's shiny shoes and great sports skills. Even the dad's eye color was different. Then, the two stop at McDonald's, where the boy finds out that the fish sandwich he ordered was his dad's favorite, right down to the identical smear of tartar sauce on the boy's cheek. McDonald's, always uniting family — or so you were supposed to think.

That ad offended a lot of people, especially widows and children who had lost their fathers. The ad was seen as manipulative and exploitative. Some mothers said their children didn't understand how the boy could be happy in the ad. Other adults, who had lost parents when they were younger, were disgusted that McDonald's appeared to use grief to sell burgers. McDonald's did apologize, and it ended up pulling the commercial off the air.

KFC had to deal with some cross-cultural problems when its Australia division released a commercial about the game of cricket in 2012. The ad was meant to air in Australia, but many in the U.S. got to see it when someone put it online. The ad shows a crowd at a cricket game, with a lone white, male fan of the Australian team surrounded by several Black fans of the West Indies cricket team. The West Indies fans are dancing and cheering with music in the background, and the Australian fan looks unsure as he's surrounded by fans of the opposing team. He then yells over the music about being in an uncomfortable situation like that before holding up a bucket of fried chicken. The music and dancing stop while the West Indies fans each take a piece.

You could interpret that uncomfortable situation as realizing that your seat is in the wrong part of the stands, but people in the U.S. didn't take it that way. Instead, they branded the ad as racist because of the stereotype in the U.S. that Black people eat fried chicken. KFC's Australia division said the ad wasn't meant that way, and Australians noted that the fried-chicken stereotype is a U.S. thing only. Some Australians were even annoyed at the U.S. reaction, accusing the Americans who complained of assuming U.S. history was the only history. KFC Australia still apologized and pulled the ad.

Carl's Jr. decided to advertise its Tex-Mex Thickburger by referencing Texas and Mexico, but this wasn't a tribute to the food from the region. This commercial featured a volleyball game between Texan and Mexican teams, featuring bikini-clad models and using the border wall as a volleyball net. Carl's Jr. claimed that its ad agency found out that people really were playing volleyball across the border like that, so it decided to use that imagery in its ad.

However, the entire mix didn't work well. The company was accused of sexual exploitation — this was a very suggestive, risqué ad — as well as objectification of women. Some viewed the ad as racist because the U.S. team was all blonde with white fans while the Mexican team was all brunette with fans whose skin was darker. The ad was also criticized for its border imagery at a time when immigration was in the political spotlight during the run-up to the 2016 election. Some weren't so concerned about the imagery, but others didn't like the way racial and immigration issues were referenced in an ad meant to sell burgers.

Burger King had some rather strange ads when it worked with ad firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky. In 2006, it released a commercial for its Triple Whopper that was possibly one of its strangest. In it, a man in an office is about to eat a Triple Whopper when he remembers that he needs a drink. He gets up, leaving the burger in the view of a co-worker in back, who then slithers like a snake onto and across the floor to the first man's table. He raises his head to the burger, and then appears to unhinge his jaw to swallow the burger whole. R&B-style music plays in the background with a woman singing lyrics like, "Eat like snake."

It doesn't end there. After the first man sees what happened, the second man mentions the Triple Whopper and delivers a call-to-action to "Eat like a snake" before making snake-style kung fu movements with his hands. A lot of people didn't know what to make of this one. Some found it utterly weird and hilarious, while others found it really creepy. Both men in the commercial were Asian, and the office had a poster with Korean writing, so the additional snake-style kung fu movements seemed stereotypical to some.

The title of Burger King's 2020 commercial says it all. It's literally a timelapse of a Whopper as it molds over 34 days. It's disgusting to watch and didn't land well, although we really have to give Burger King some points for bravery. Not every food company wants to show that its food can develop mold so easily. BK's whole point was that its food was real, fresh, and void of any artificial preservatives, unlike the disturbingly common videos and photo montages of McDonald's items that never visibly decay over spans of months and years (McDonald's claimed that if the environment were dry enough, its food wouldn't develop mold and would instead dry out, which a food expert confirmed to the BBC in 2019).

The problem was that a lot of people didn't interpret the ad as a testament to fresh food. Many thought the commercial was gross, and some even claimed they no longer wanted to buy Whoppers after seeing the ad. However, the ad gave Burger King more publicity overall, and many customers did get the central message, albeit attached to some bad imagery. Comments online noted that the campaign was brave, but for some, it linked Whoppers to moldy food.

KFC decided to release a commercial in 2005 for its new Zinger Crunch Salad in the U.K. The problem was, they made the commercial so difficult to listen to — and so attractive to children who wanted to copy it — that the ad was eventually named the most complained-about ad overall in the U.K. The commercial focuses on an emergency call center where the workers are eating KFC and singing about how delicious it is while their mouths are full. The food muffles the voices so badly that the commercial relies on captions to get its message across.

The complaints were almost immediate, with 340 people contacting the Advertising Standards Authority in the first week of the ad being on the air. Overall, 1,671 people complained about the ad promoting bad manners, with 41 complaints saying their kids copied the full-mouth singing. In comparison, 2004's most hated ad got only 806 complaints before being banned. In 2012, a round-up of the most hated ads in the U.K. put the KFC commercial in the top spot. Believe it or not, one of the ads that got fewer complaints than KFC's showed a blind man kicking a cat.

Arby's decided to go after vegetarians in a 2015 commercial that, well, offended vegetarians and vegans. The commercial shows a grill with sizzling brown-sugar bacon for most of the commercial, changing visuals only toward the end when a phone number for a "vegetarian support hotline" scrolls across the bottom of the screen. The whole thing dissolves into an Arby's logo with the same phone number appearing next to it. The audio is of a woman's voice addressing vegetarians as if this were a prescription drug ad aimed at a frustrating health condition while the bacon sizzles quietly in the background. The cherry on top of the meat-temptation sundae was the fact that the phone number was real and led to a "support" voice menu.

Arby's claimed that it had some vegetarians on staff who had commented about resisting the bacon. The company said that it decided to have a little fun based on those comments. The public reaction was pretty much as you've probably guessed. A lot of non-vegetarians chuckled, news outlets treated the ad as amusing, and vegetarians and vegans ended up frustrated at being the target of Arby's joke.

It might be easy to think they were overreacting. However, additional comments online pointed out that Arby's had also placed ads aimed at vegetarians on Spotify in 2017 and had offered a "vegetarian" option on a Leap Day that was an empty bun. Vegetarians were tired of Arby's antics.

Each McDonald's franchisee can decide what to put in the area under the sign outside McDonald's restaurants. These are the boards where the crew might advertise a deal or put a holiday message. In 2015, McDonald's created a commercial that showed a series of these boards, with messages ranging from inspirational sayings to birth announcements to memorials for 9/11 and Boston Marathon bombing victims. One photo in the montage showed a flooded McDonald's with a sign stating that the location would come back from the disaster. The commercial ended with a link to a Tumblr account that had information about each sign.

This did not go over well. The commercial did get a positive reaction from many, including advertising and branding firms. However, others (mainly on social media, but some criticism came from more traditional avenues) thought the use of disasters and terrorist attacks to sell burgers was crass and inappropriate. McDonald's explained that the ad was meant to show that each location was a member of its community — in other words, not just another fast-food place with no connection to the people around it — and admitted that it wasn't expecting the reaction it received. However, just a couple of years before, two other companies had tweets that mentioned 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Those companies also received criticism, so the online reaction to McDonald's ad wasn't all that unusual.

Burger King had another a scandal on its hands in 2019, thanks to a franchisee in New Zealand who posted a video on social media. The video was an ad for a burger called the "Vietnamese Sweet Chili Tendercrisp Burger," which honestly sounds like an awesome burger. Unfortunately, the ad wasn't awesome; it showed Westerners attempting to eat the burger while holding it with two excessively large chopsticks.

At first, that looks like the Instagram ad made fun of Westerners being unable to use chopsticks, and at least one person interpreted it that way. A few others thought it was no big deal. Some didn't see why the use of chopsticks had to be interpreted as racist, but many others (and we can't stress that "many" enough) called the ad racist and demeaning. Criticism came from not only New Zealanders, but also from places as far away as China. People were tired of chopsticks being presented as hard to use, and many were tired of the default "Asian" symbol always being chopsticks. Even those who didn't think the ad was outright racist thought it was in poor taste. Some were surprised that the ad was made in the first place after Dolce & Gabbana's infamous "chopsticks with Italian food" ad that forced the fashion brand to cancel shows and nearly ended the commercial model's career. Burger King New Zealand had the franchisee pull the ad as soon as complaints started to roll in.