If you are a lawyer Brazilian, for three days you were entitled to a free Burger King sandwich. All you had to do was go to one of the 240 points of sale across the country that were taking part in the initiative, equipped with a professional association card, and collect, even directly from your car through the Drive Thru, a BK Taste 1.0, the new burger just launched in Brazil and immediately ended up in the center of the controversy on charges of having copied that of the competition (i.e. McDonald's).
A campaign to defend yourself from plagiarism accusations
Precisely to reject the charges and demonstrate “proof of complaint” that the BK Taste 1.0 it's not plagiarism, Burger King has started this curious countryside between January 13th and 15th. Achieving the desired effect, that is, that people talked about it: in Brazil all the newspapers reported the news and the lawyers themselves didn't need to be asked twice, so much so that videos of dozens of lawyers queuing in the Drive Thru in various cities, from Rio de Janeiro a Salvador.
At the same time, Burger King has also created a promotional video in which a lawyer appears intent on defending the BK Taste 1.0 in court, "on trial" for being the replica of a similar product from the well-known competitor company. In reality, BK Brasil claims, the new sandwich is inspired not to those of McDonald's but to another of their own chain, the historic one Whopper, still one of the most appreciated by clients. Brazilian lawyers have therefore been able to taste it for free (maximum one per person, according to the rules) to get an idea of whether the flavour was truly authentic and not identical to that of the rival fast food restaurant. Even though, as several users on the web have pointed out, the hamburger should have been offered to the Judges, theoretically more impartial.
Burger King in Brazil is controlled by Zamp, a food holding company that also owns Starbucks e Subway and whose board of directors includes the son-in-law of American President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, who is a partner through his investment firm Affinity Partners. In December Affinity, founded in 2021 by Ivanka Trump's 44-year-old husband, has obtained a huge amount of funding from the Arab world, to be precise from Qatar Investment Authority and the Lunate, an asset management company based in Abu Dhabi.
