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Ranked: the 5 biggest mistakes made by famous food brands
Major food fails Nobody's perfect, and we all make mistakes... But these missteps by major food brands were on another level. The fallout was huge, leaving the brands with disgruntled customers and – in some cases – plummeting sales. Whether messing around with popular recipes, introducing bizarre new products or making baffling marketing decisions, these are the biggest ever mistakes made by food brands.
1. McDonald's Szechuan sauce
In 2018, hugely popular adult animated series Rick and Morty included a joke about Rick making a stop at McDonald’s while exploring his memories. The reason, he explained, was so that he could taste a very special McDonald’s dipping sauce: Szechuan. It had been created as a promotional tie-in for Disney’s 1998 film Mulan, and discontinued soon after. However, after the sauce was mentioned on the show, McDonald’s decided to bring Szechuan back for a single day in the US. The result was utter chaos...
2. Toblerone's twin troubles
‘Shrinkflation’ refers to when a product’s price remains the same, but its size is reduced. Toblerone offered one of the most famous examples of this in 2016, when the brand removed two chocolate chunks from its UK and German bars, adding bigger gaps (or valleys) between the iconic chocolate peaks. It took almost two years of complaints before Toblerone's owner, Mondelez International, returned the bar to its original shape – but in a bigger, more expensive size.
3. Burger King's Halloween Whopper
In October 2015, Burger King released the Halloween Whopper with a seasonally appropriate black bun. But the Halloween treat turned into a trick once some customers reported that the burger bun had turned their stool a vibrant shade of green. Experts later revealed that the food colouring used in the bun couldn't be properly absorbed during digestion, resulting in, well, a troubling bathroom break. Unsurprisingly, the burger bun hasn’t been seen on the menu since.
4. New Coke
Has there ever been a more public failure than New Coke? In 1985, Coca-Cola changed its recipe to fend off new pretenders to the soft drink crown. However, the wider public hated the new taste – and sales nosedived. Within three months, the original recipe returned, rebranded Coca-Cola Classic to distinguish it from the disastrous experiment (the 'Classic' was dropped in 2009). The company was rewarded with a huge sales boost – so huge, in fact, that some now theorise New Coke was simply a marketing gimmick. Amazingly, though, New Coke survived as Coke II until 2002.
5. KFC runs out of... chicken
In 2018, nearly 700 of KFC’s 900 UK outlets had to close their doors after the chain ran out of – wait for it – chicken. KFC had just changed suppliers from Bidvest to DHL when DHL suffered catastrophic ‘operational issues’ that left KFC outlets without any chicken. This naturally ruffled fans' feathers, and KFC had to deal with days of bad press. Eventually, though, KFC got its stores reopened inside of a week and apologised to its customers. “A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It’s not ideal”, the chain quipped.
