The people have spoken. They took to Twitter and other forms of social media and made their voices heard by one of the largest fast food restaurant chains in the world. They proclaimed that Burger King’s Tendercrisp chicken sandwich was “disgusting” and “awful” and even “tastes like disappointment.”
Now thesad-wich is out. The company replaced it with an different “better” chicken sandwich. “To be perfectly honest, over time people lost interest in our current chicken sandwich,” president of Burger King North America, Alex Macedo said to CNBC.
Interestingly, even after scrolling through tweets, it’s hard to tell what people actually hated about the Tendercrisp. Someone described it at crisp, but not tender. That doesn’t seem like a reason to completely hate it, but fast food fans are a fickle crowd. What’s popular one day is berated and bad-mouthed on Twitter the next.
The replacement sandwich, the “Crispy Chicken” has a similar name, but Burger King believes that it’s a major improvement over the original. The new sandwich has a 4-ounce fried chicken patty (slightly smaller than the Tendercrisp). Since part of the Twitter chatter was about how dry the other sandwich was, BK decided to change up the way the chicken was marinated and cooked. Finishing off the sandwich are lettuce, tomatoes and mayonnaise all resting on a potato bun.
One of the major problems people seemed to have with the Tendercrisp was its price (around $6 dollars). The new sandwich will sell for around $4 dollars.
https://twitter.com/CatieCarmichael/status/795150364114845696
#BurgerKing isn't the #tendercrisp supposed to be both of those and not just crisp? #awful Talk to the deepfry guy at 273 canal st!
— jebreh m. baker (@VDUBJB) May 15, 2015
Hey #burgerking #bk what happened to the #tendercrisp ?
— Darlene (@darvpg) November 5, 2014
https://twitter.com/_SimplyCurvy/status/621887653512904704
burger king chicken tendercrisp burgers are disgusting and taste like fish #feindercrisp #aculinarytale
— claire (@clairejoines) October 2, 2013
At least Burger King realizes that if people are Tweeting negatively about something this widely, it’s usually bad. It’s not like this was one, lone Twitter user with an egg for a photo and only two followers. This was real people, many of which even consider themselves to be fans of the chain. “You can’t take yourself too seriously to admit that your current product is below standard,” said Macedo.
In an effort to prove that they aren’t just launching the same, garbage sandwich under a different name, BK blindfolded some of the people who rained down hate on Twitter and had them try the new sandwich. Obviously, they liked it. Otherwise the ad wouldn’t really work.
Stories like this show how powerful social media really is. It also shows that major corporations are taking Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other forms of social media very seriously.
