The results of this taste test are truly baffling. 

If you’re walking around town with a hankering for burgers and a big appetite to fill, Burger King is usually one of the top options. Not only does this chain serve good-sized burgers but it also offers limited-time all-you-can-eat specials, and now there’s a new way to get more burger for your yen, with a customisation called “All Heavy”.

This upsize option, which lets you request extra lettuce, onions, pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise at no extra cost, sounded like it might be too good to be true. So we placed an order for it as part of a Whopper Set through the app and then ducked out to our nearest branch in Shinjuku to pick it up for a taste test.

▼ To upsize the burger, simply scroll to the bottom and click the “Heavy” drop down menu…

…then select the individual items you’d like extra of (the options are lettuce, onion, pickles, ketchup and mayonnaise), or click the “All Heavy” box to select them all.


In addition to ordering the All Heavy version, we also ordered a regular Whopper so we could compare them.

▼ Regular on the left, All Heavy on the right.

Checking the receipt, both versions do actually cost the same: 640 yen (US$4.03) each.

Unwrapping them, we were surprised to see that visually, they didn’t look that different.

▼ Regular Whopper on the left, All Heavy version on the right.

Lifting the top bun for a closer look, we could see that the regular version already had a good amount of lettuce, onions and mayonnaise inside.

Lifting the top bun of the All Heavy revealed…

▼ …huh?

This was not what we were expecting. The contents looked almost identical to the regular, and if anything perhaps there seemed to be even less inside. To be sure we weren’t imagining things, we peeled all the lettuce off the top buns and placed them on their corresponding burger patty bun for a more precise comparison.

▼ Again, the regular on the left looked to have more lettuce and onions than the upsized version on the right.

Puzzled by what we were seeing, we began to wonder if maybe the staff had made a mistake and put the “All Heavy” sticker on the wrong burger. Figuring there was one way to get to the bottom of things, we decided to place each burger on the scales to see what would be revealed.

▼ Placing the regular one on the kitchen scale, it weighed 281 grams (9.9 ounces).

Next, the All Heavy, which weighed in at…

▼ … 267 grams!

This 14-gram discrepancy made us think the staff really had made a mistake with the labels. Still, holding out hope that we might’ve overlooked something, we decided to separate all the components for a final, thorough inspection.

▼ Regular on the left, All Heavy on the right.

This revealed that the All Heavy actually contained more of some ingredients – although the lettuce was sorely lacking, it had more onion rings and more pickles.

With six pickles on the All Heavy and four on the regular Whopper, it was clear that the staff hadn’t made a mistake with our order.

Baffled by this result, we were now more confused than ever over the new All Heavy customisation. Despite containing more pickles and more lettuce, it weighed less than a regular Whopper and didn’t seem all that more plentiful.

So is it good value for money? Well, the difference in ingredients wasn’t that great, so the “All Heavy” moniker may not be all it’s cracked up to be. In these days of rising prices, though, you can’t go wrong with a free deal, so if you’re a fan of pickles and onion, we’d recommend giving it a try. Otherwise, stick to the regular Whopper, or if you’re hungry, smash two of them together for a truly heavy meal.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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