Times Fast Food Went Too Far

The fast food industry is unimaginably competitive. In the hopes of outdoing their rivals, restaurant chains release an endless stream of innovative creations just to get customers through their doors. But while a lot of them are ridiculously good, others turn out to just be ridiculous. From adding insane amounts of sugar to completely unnecessary ingredients, let's find out which companies have taken their fast food game way too far!

Hula Burger

A lot of people argue that pineapple has absolutely no right to be on a pizza, but what about putting it on a burger? Or, as McDonald’s tried back in the 1960s, replacing the burger entirely with a single ring of pineapple, essentially just grilled pineapple with cheese on a bun.

It was called the Hula Burger, and while it sounded as bad as it looked, it was cooked up for a pretty interesting reason. Back in the 1960s, McDonald’s discovered that their sales were seriously tanking in areas with large Catholic populations. It turned out those chaste churchgoers often abstained from eating meat on Fridays, so McDonald’s came up with an ingenious solution: meatless burgers!

The idea was great, but the resulting Hula Burger not so much! While the drive did give rise to the Hula Burger’s more popular brother, The Fillet-o-Fish, that peculiar pineapple sandwich is a fast food failure that’s best left forgotten!

McAfrika

A burger wrapped in pita bread may not sound all that controversial, but when McDonald’s released the questionably named ‘"McAfrika" back in 2002, their timing couldn’t have been worse.

It was made to celebrate the 2002 Winter Olympics, but that year a devastating famine struck 6 countries in southern Africa. And while 12 million Africans starved, McDonald’s was making bank on a food with their country’s name on it! Not only that, but the limited edition burger wasn’t even available in Africa.

Despite the backlash from humanitarian agencies, McDonald’s flat-out refused to withdraw the burger. They even went as far as to release a burger with the same name again in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics! Unsurprisingly, it was met with a similarly negative outcry. It's like all the money they made off the back of this burger wasn’t enough to buy them any common sense!

Double Down

Just about everyone knows what the simplest components of a burger are. But in 2010, KFC threw that out the window when they introduced the Double Down "Burger". The traditional bun was replaced by two pieces of fried chicken, which sandwiched a center of bacon, cheese, and BBQ sauce!

It was a pretty polarizing product and it wasn’t just the vegans that couldn’t stomach it! While the controversy of its bun-less components made it popular, it failed to sell well, and wasn’t initially a huge hit with fast-foodies. Though that didn’t stop KFC from expanding their double down range around the world!

Over in South Korea, they took it one step further by adding in a hamburger patty to create the outrageous Zinger Double Down King!

And in the Philippines, the Double Down burger evolved into the Double Down Dog, a fried chicken breast patty wrapped around a hot dog!

But it was Canada that truly won that fast-food race, by introducing the radical Waffle Double Down. Yes, it was made with two chicken fillets around a Belgian waffle, drizzled in a kind of maple syrup mayonnaise! Is there no end to that increasingly greasy double down dynasty?

KFC's Chizza

If you thought KFC went too far replacing the buns of its burgers with chicken, then look away before we delve into what they did to pizza! Called the Chizza, KFC created an unholy lovechild of fried chicken and pizza by replacing the pizza dough with one, huge, fried chicken fillet!

It was available only in select KFC outlets across Asia, and combined toppings of tomato sauce, chicken-ham, pineapple chunks, mozzarella, and cheese sauce! It doesn’t sound that bad, but what was actually served to the customers really didn’t meet marketing expectations!

And while replacing the base certainly solved the classic pizza problem of picky eaters leaving their crusts, reviewers noted that its oily, greasy taste left a lot to be desired. Maybe a side order of self loathing would have added to the flavor, all washed down with a large cup of regret!

McPizza

KFC aren’t the only fast food company to try their luck in the pizza arena! In the 1980s, McDonald’s saw that Pizza Hut was growing in the US by 10% each year, and decided it too wanted a slice of the pizza pie market. So, McDonald’s went to extreme lengths to bring their strange sounding McPizza to the hungry American masses.

They spent years developing specialist ovens that would cook an entire pizza in a matter of minutes! Although they ended up being so big that some franchisees had to remodel their kitchens to fit the humungous pizza making machines in. And like that wasn’t expensive enough, the machines cost a phenomenal $50,000 a piece! That’s equivalent to about $100,000 today!

But even though they could cook a pizza in just 10 minutes, it was a lifetime in comparison to their already made burgers. Not only that, but the price tag of those pizzas started at $5.99. That was a huge hike considering most of their hamburgers at the time were less than a dollar!

Like that wasn’t a bad enough start for the McPizza, McDonald’s main pizza competitor Pizza Hut suddenly sparked an all out war. In areas where McPizza was being served, Pizza Hut started offering buy one get one free deals and slapped them down publicly by calling their pizzas McFrozen!

Sadly, that was the final nail in the coffin for McDonald’s brash attempt at fast food domination, and McPizza was removed from menus across the states. For all the time and money that went into them, they sure were one expensive McStake!

McSpaghetti

McDonald’s disastrous attempt to dominate the Italian fast food market didn’t start and stop with pizza! Around the same time as the McPizza was first introduced, franchises across the US also added several pasta dishes to their menus. Along with fettucine alfredo and lasagna, a spaghetti and meatballs dish called McSpaghetti hit the stage.

But despite the universal love of that simple Italian dish, McDonald’s simply couldn’t convince customers to order a pasta dish at a burger joint! After all anyone can make spaghetti at home, but no one can make a Big Mac and McDonald’s fries in their kitchen!

So, McDonald’s discontinued the line, which was another huge hit to its plans of fast food supremacy. But even though it failed to appeal to the American market, when it was introduced to the Philippines the dish suddenly thrived!

Served with a crispy chicken leg, the super sweet red sauce really hit the spot with its Filipino consumer base. At least it found a home in Asia, because it probably wouldn't be welcome in Italy!

Cheeto Burrito

Big brand food mashups have given us some truly blessed items, like Jolly Rancher cereal, Snickers coffee mate, and Fanta flavored snack packs! But one crossover that took it way too far was the snack infused abomination born from the Cheetos and Taco Bell mashup, The Cheeto Burrito.

Cheetos Are Inside of Burritos, Now. Thanks A LOT, Taco Bell. - Food Feeder by Tasted

It was a fast food fusion of seasoned beef, buttery rice, cheese, and sauce with the added corn meal crunch of the cheesy chip snack! On paper, the combination sounded like a marketing dream, so it was tested out and sold for just $1 in Taco Bell restaurants around Cincinnati, Ohio, back in 2016.

But while fast foodies were expecting a super crunchy, supremely cheesy wrap, what they got was mild disappointment wrapped in a tortilla! Adding the Cheetos into a deluge of wet and saucy ingredients meant that for the most part they came out slightly soggy. And they didn’t add half the cheesy flavor patrons expected! Fortunately, that unhealthy union never made it onto the main Taco Bell menu.

Cap’n Crunch Delights

Amazingly, the Cheeto Burrito wasn’t the first joint branded nightmare food that Taco Bell ever served up. Just one year before, in 2015, the Tex Mex chain buddied up with the makers of Cap’n Crunch cereal to produce ‘Cap’n Crunch Delights’ colorful donut holes sprinkled with mashed up cereal!

Usually, deep fried donut holes are covered in a tasty array of sugar or sprinkles, so replacing them with cereal was a bit of an odd move. But that wasn’t all! The holes were also filled with a milk flavored icing, really giving customers a sense of what it would be like to eat a deep fried bowl of cereal.

And the absolute worst part of all of that is that they were sold as a breakfast item! Considering a 12 pack of those contained over 1000 calories and a tooth rotting 42 grams of sugar, I wouldn’t say they constitute to a healthy or nutritious breakfast!

Kit Kat Chocodilla

In 2017, Taco Bell added a new chocolate quesadilla to their American dessert menu, called “The Kit Kat Chocodilla”. It was a brand name take on their original Chocodilla, with added Kit Kat wafer biscuits to give the sugary quesadilla a little added crunch.

It had been tested out in the UK a year before, but even with their questionable culinary standards, it raised a few eyebrows. Although it’s not hard to see why. The sprinkle of wafer over the oozing chocolate sauce reminds me of leaving a Kit Kat out on a hot day and letting it melt inside the wrapper!

Black Halloween Whopper

Back in October 2015, Burger King decided to go the extra mile to celebrate the spooky season by releasing the brilliantly black Halloween Whopper. The dark color of the sandwich was achieved by baking A.1 steak sauce into it, along with a little food dye that made up less than 1% of the overall bun.

But that special edition burger ended up having a hilariously unforeseen side effect on its customers, it turned their poop bright green! Across the country, people took to twitter to report seeing colors akin to an Irish countryside in their toilet bowls, and #GreenPoop quickly began trending.

Fortunately, that trip to the emerald toilet city wasn’t anything for customers to worry about. Burger King had used an acceptable amount of food dye, as dictated by the FDA, but in a concentrated blue form.

While your gut absorbs most food colorings, any remnants left floating around in your system can mix with the yellowish green bile in your intestine, turning colors like dark blue into goblin green! Even though Burger King claimed the side effect was entirely unintentional, the whopper ended up being the ultimate Halloween trick or treat!

The Anti-Happy Meal

Sometimes, the marketing ploys with the best intentions really miss the mark, like Burger King’s controversial range of Real Meals. They were a spoof of McDonald’s infamous Happy Meal, a well loved value kids meal, all in the name of 2019’s Mental Health Awareness Week.

With the slogan "no one is happy all the time" they released a line of alternative emotion boxes, effectively saying that it was ok to not be ok. It was a pretty clever idea, but the campaign was met with a litany of criticisms. For a start, it wasn’t clear what actually came in each of those boxes: Were they different? Was it all whoppers? Or was it just a handful of Prozac?

It took combing through the small print to learn that it was just a regular whopper combo meal! But looking beyond the burgers, the mental health message appeared to be trivialized. It became clear that using mental health as a front to sell people burgers was a pretty outrageous idea, and it wasn’t repeated in 2020.

Mountain Dew A.M.

Caffeine helps a lot of us wake up in the morning, usually in the form of freshly made coffee. But back in 2012, Taco Bell offered its customers a different start to the morning; a sugary, caffeine fueled, heart attack in a glass called Mountain Dew A.M.

The drink itself was a fairly simple and grim sounding combination of the carbonated, caffeinated, and super sugary Mountain Dew with orange juice. While adding a little vodka would turn that into a semi acceptable Screwdriver or Dewdriver cocktail, Taco Bell was serving the super strange concoction as a breakfast item!

And breaking it down, a large 20-oz cup of that morning madness would contain a phenomenal 46 grams of sugar. That’s the same as adding 11 sugar cubes to your morning cup of coffee! Although, a cup of coffee would admittedly have almost twice the amount of caffeine. But who needs caffeine to wake up when you could have all that sugar rushing through your veins?

Pickle Juice Slush

Some people really, really love pickles, though even their biggest fans might think twice about trying them in a super sweet slushie form! But back in 2018, US Drive-in chain "Sonic" announced that they were going to give it a try. They released the bright green Pickle Juice Slush as part of their summertime menu to the total confusion of the nation.

While some were brave enough to try it, others tried their best to gulp back their disgust! But, in trying to get the US to fall in love with that pickle flavored product, many tasters noticed Sonic had made the drink incredibly sweet!

It seemed that fast food company had tried to overcompensate for the pickle’s natural acidity, but that had real pickle fans complaining that the slush wasn’t pickle-y enough! Looks like nailing that great green monster ended up being a step too far for Sonic. And in the wrong direction, at that!

Jalapeno Milkshake

How spicy do you like your milkshakes? It’s an odd question that exists thanks to another of Sonic’s odd fast food concoctions, the Chocolate Covered Jalapeno Milkshake! Released as part of their summer menu shake up in April 2014, the startling flavor combination had customers thinking it was an April Fools prank.

But no, those chocolate shakes actually came with huge jalapeno pieces floating around in them, and some were even garnished with the spicy green devils! Those weren’t pedestrian pickled jalapenos either! They were all fresh cut and sizzling with spice.

While some absolute masochists enjoyed the sweet burn that the jalapenos gave the chocolate shake, many others were rightfully horrified! And it looks like Sonic got the message loud and clear, because that joke of a milkshake hasn’t made a return to their menu since.

Cheeseburger Stuffed Pizza Crust

Pizza Hut are well known for stuffing their crusts full of delicious delights to make the most out of every meal. From gooey mozzarella to mini hotdogs, sharing a slice never looked so good! That was until they went too far and introduced the cheeseburger stuffed pizza crust back in 2012.

Known as the Crown Crust in the Middle East, the apocalyptic pie had even the most avid pizza lovers wondering if Pizza Hut had finally lost the plot! Then they discovered its nutritional information. At 288 calories per slice, the monster crust of the pizza meant the whole pie had close to a mammoth 3000 calories.

That’s about 1000 calories more than the average human should be eating in an entire day! Not only that, but when those pizza pies arrived, customers couldn’t help but notice that they looked vastly different to their pristine promo photos, and not in a good way.

24-Karat Champagne Wings

Plenty of businesses these days offer special discounts and free treats to celebrate their achievements with the public. But back in 2018, fried chicken chain Popeyes had something a little more extravagant in mind!

To celebrate the opening of their 3000th restaurant, the company introduced the luxurious looking 24 Karat Champagne Wings to their menu. For one day only at 4 select locations around the US, patrons could indulge in wings that had been hand battered in champagne and then coated with edible, 24 carat gold flakes!

While restaurants up and down the country were also hopping on the edible gold hype-train, they were selling gold grilled cheese sandwiches for a wallet busting $214! Or 12 inch gold encrusted pizza’s for a bank breaking $2000! But Popeyes sold all that for an incredibly economical $5 and as you can imagine, they sold out almost instantly.

Freaky Pumpkin Spice Fries

With the words "pumpkin spice", you probably automatically think of basic white girls in autumn; drinking pumpkin spice lattes, clad in Ugg boots, and Instagraming everything! But while putting pumpkin spice into just about everything started off as an American craze, it’s found a stranger foothold over in Japan.

To celebrate Halloween back in 2016, McDonald’s Japan offered their signature French fries surprisingly smothered in chocolate and pumpkin spiced sauces! Called “The Halloween Choco Potato”, the strange flavor combo was designed to complement the saltiness of the fries. But they didn’t stop there!

A little later that October, they released another spooky flavored sauce simply called ‘purple potato’. While some found both the dishes delicious, others just couldn’t get their head around the strange sweet and savory combinations! Despite the feedback, I imagine all the basic Becky’s are already trying to book their plane tickets to Japan.

Bacon Sundae

It’s almost impossible to pinpoint where fast food companies started to fight over who could have the freakiest food creations. Some think it started with KFC’s notorious double down saga, although it likely goes back further than that.

Well, however it started, in 2012 the rivalry pushed Burger King to release the truly bizarre Bacon Sundae. It was scoops of vanilla ice cream drizzled lavishly with fudge, caramel, and bacon crumbles, all topped off with a piece of thick cut bacon!

While it seemed like a bright idea to Burger King, the world just wasn’t ready for such a madly meaty treat. Something about the super sweet sauce combined with the supreme sodium hit of the bacon left people with a bad taste in their mouths. And at a belly busting 510 calories per serving with a little something on their waistlines as well!

Glitter Pizza

Unicorns may be beautiful, magical creatures, but the glittery unicorn pizza from DagWoods Pizzeria in Santa Monica just looks cursed! Officially called the MagicalAF margarita pizza pie, that New York style staple comes with the unconventional topping of edible glitter.

But the sheer amount of shine just doesn’t look right on the savory dish! Sure, their clientele of color hungry kids seem to love it, but would you say all that glitter on a 16 inch pizza is really worth a whopping $36? In comparison to their regular margarita pizza, that’s an additional $17 all for a flavorless, edible tinsel topping!

Donut Burger

Fried chicken is good. Donuts are good. There are no arguments there. But the marketing team at KFC clearly thought that adding those two good things together would mean a sweet and savory success! And so, in 2019, they released the truly insane looking Kentucky Fried Chicken and Donut sandwich.

For a tasty $7.49, the sandwich on its own consisted of two glazed donuts with a fried chicken center. While vloggers and reviewers were quick to admit that the combination tasted pretty good, their eyes bulged as much as their bellies when they saw what was in there!

A single sandwich contained almost the entire daily fat intake of an average adult at a staggering 65 grams, along with 40 grams of sugar. That’s the same as 10 whole cubes of sugar!

Maybe if the sandwich were split over one donut, a bit more like a regular bun it wouldn’t be such an assault on the mouth. But then without that sugar overload where would the shock value of that sweet scandal be?

Sweety Con Nutella

At first glance, this burger in the picture below looks like any other McDonald’s hamburger, dripping with BBQ sauce, sandwiched in between two buns. You can almost taste it! But if you bit into that burger expecting meat, you’d get one hell of a sweet surprise.

That brown baked center is actually a gooey layer of the world’s premier hazelnut spread, Nutella! Only available in Italian McDonald’s restaurants, the adorably named Sweety con Nutella is a combination of hazelnut spread and cocoa, all encased in an oddly regular McDonald’s burger bun.

As grand as it sounds, it’s actually much smaller than it appears in the pictures. Although it still finds the space to fit 256 calories inside! While it’s received high praise in the Italian market, the rest of the world probably isn't really ready for a dessert burger!

Windows 7 Whopper

When Microsoft launched its Windows 7 software back in 2009, they wanted it to be an event the whole world would remember. They buddied up with companies internationally to promote the upcoming release, one of which surprisingly was Burger King!

While food and tech don’t really have much in common, that didn’t stop Burger King from going the extra mile and releasing the hilariously named Windows 7 Whopper across Japan. With a staggering 7 separate beef patties weighing in at a gut busting 2.2 lbs, the burger looked more like a rendering issue than a viable meal!

But at a cleverly priced ¥777, which was roughly $8.50 at the time, that weird and wonderful whopper became a sensation. It sold over 10,000 units in its first week, proving it was popular with desk bound coders! Although, at that size, it might have given Japan one nation sized case of lockjaw.

If you were amazed at these fast food horrors, you might also want to read about shocking fast food facts! Thanks for reading.