The Staggering Number Of Ways You Can Customize A Burger King Whopper
Math is a funny thing, and the way exponential growth works can quickly become unbelievable. For instance, it's a common claim that a sheet of paper can never be folded more than 7 times. This isn't technically true, and a high schooler earned a Guinness World Record by folding a sheet 12 times. But if you were to fold a 0.003-inch-thick piece 42 times, it would be thick enough to reach the moon. Whopper growth works the same way.
No one is interested in folding food here, but customizing a Burger King Whopper can still produce impressive numbers. According to promotional material from Burger King, there are over 200,000 ways to customize a Whopper. While it may sound impossible, it's not, depending on how loose you are with what a customized Whopper means, anyway.
At one point, Burger King specified 221,184 ways to have a Whopper. A Redditor asked if anyone could verify that claim. One commenter used just the handful of options available on the online order form, including cheese, bacon, four veggies with multiple quantity options, and four condiments. Even with those limited choices, the math produced more than 46,000 possible Whoppers. This didn't even include options like an extra patty, one less patty, or extra veggies and condiments.
If you include the extra options, the number becomes even more outrageous. Adding one, two, or three patties triples the total to 139,968. And you can still add more toppings to take a Whopper to the next level, including jalapeños, onion rings, fries, guacamole, and more, depending on availability.
You won't run out of options for having a Whopper your way
If Burger King truly lets you make a custom Whopper any way you want to, using anything it has as a topping, then there are well over one billion ways to customize a Whopper. It has at least six more condiment options not mentioned yet, other kinds of cheese, toppings like crispy onions, Impossible patties, and more. So the number Burger King chose, while dramatic, seems to just be a marketing figure that undersells the possibilities.
With so many options, you can find fans defending almost any conceivable version. Even a simple Whopper with cheese has customers at odds, with many preferring their Whopper cheese-less. In 2024, Burger King ran the Million Dollar Whopper Contest, which encouraged diners to share their customized Whopper creations, with some of the creations later being made available from the restaurant.
We've given you Whopper ordering tips in the past with suggestions like making sure it's hot off the grill or asking for "heavy all" so you get extra of all toppings and condiments. In a thread detailing people's favorite Whopper orders on Reddit, the original poster recommended doubling down with both cheddar and Swiss cheese. One commenter said their favorite was a double Impossible Whopper with bacon, lettuce, pickles, and BBQ sauce. Another poster chose no tomatoes, extra onions, and asked to have it cut in half. That last tweak wasn't even factored into the one billion figure. It's safe to say that, if you like Whoppers, you could eat a different one every day for the rest of your life and then some.