8 Things We Learned About Burger King’s New Leadership

We tend to focus more on the wacky food items and creepy mascots coming out of Burger King, but we learned this week that there are interesting things going on behind the scenes. Burger King is changing the way that it does business in a way that will either fail catastrophically or set an example for the rest of the fast-food industry.

Bloomberg Businessweek explained the company’s changes to its business model and the relatively young CEO in this week’s cover story.

Burger King’s new chief executive officer, Daniel Schwartz, is only 33 years old. The only CEO in the Fortune 1000 who is younger is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Many of the company’s top officers are pretty young, too: their chief financial officer and head of investor relations are both under 30.

Burger King now owns only 52 of its restaurants, having sold more than 1,200 corporate-owned locations since new ownership took over in 2010. They use these for testing and training, but Some experts think that’s a bad idea: by owning so few restaurants, the corporate overlords will know less about what’s going on in restaurants on the ground.

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