The Burger Chain That Tried (And Failed) To Bring Burritos To Its Menu

The fast food world is one of endless attempts at innovating and tempting the customer with unusual new products. Sometimes these items land, like KFC's Original Recipe chicken tenders, and sometimes they baffle, like Subway's Footlong cookies (reintroduced in 2024, complete with a holiday version). So it's no surprise that there are epic fails along the way. Does anyone even remember McDonald's Onion Nuggets, or Burger King's Whopperito? Yes, you read that right. If you're unfamiliar with the Whopperito and your first mental image is of a hamburger inside a tortilla, you're not far off.

Introduced in 2016 with much fanfare, Burger King's Whopperito featured chunks of ground beef, lettuce, tomato, onions, and a "queso" sauce, inside a large flour tortilla, going national in August of that year. It was essentially a chopped-up Whopper with some Tex-Mex seasonings, according to reviewers. While the days of a burger chain just selling burgers — like McDonald's in the 1950s — are largely long gone, it makes sense that BK might try and adapt available ingredients in new ways. Unfortunately, the results did not seem to convince anyone that the King knew his way around Mexican American dishes: The whole venture lasted three months.

Burger King positioned the Whopperito as a limited-time offering, according to a spokesperson at the time. But clearly, chains would prefer that novelty items take off, rather than receive weird reviews on YouTube. In essence, the mashed-up contents of a Whopper were thrown into a large flour tortilla, then rolled into burrito form. No rice, no beans, and a disproportionate amount of lettuce. Reviewers reported it tasted just like a Whopper with nacho cheese, and the ground beef was disorienting.

It wasn't only the reviews threatening to doom the Whopperito. Two market forces suggested maybe the timing wasn't right: McDonald's had just removed its popular, but time-consuming Snack Wraps. Meanwhile, Chipotle — the juggernaut that was the first fast casual chain, which the Whopperito may have been geared to compete against — suffered a massive stock tumble following an E. Coli outbreak and a round of store closures in late 2015. So the footsteps BK was following weren't as clear as they had been a year prior.

But Burger King didn't give up on wraps. In 2023, the company announced it would launch three different Royal Crispy Chicken Wraps. The chicken nugget burritos don't include cheese, but do include a tomato. In February, 2024, declaring the wraps to be a hit with fans, BK expanded the line to feature a Fiery Buffalo Royal Crispy Wrap. And McD's fans, don't despair: That company recently announced that the Snack Wrap will return in 2025.