What Alasdair Murdoch, CEO of Burger King UK, teaches us about margin defence in QSR operations
Beef prices have risen around 50% over the past two years, and the UK minimum wage is up roughly 50% from 2022. Every quick-service brand in the country has felt both hits, with most watching their P&L compress.
So how do you grow when two of your biggest costs are moving in the wrong direction?
Burger King UK CEO, Alasdair Murdoch, did exactly that.
Running more than 600 sites, Alasdair has grown tickets and transactions through the same period.
That doesn't happen by accident, and it's the reason this episode of What's Cooking with Alasdair is one of the sharpest master classes in defending QSR margin we've had on the show.
Keep reading to find out more about the best practices and tactics behind Alasdair’s success.
The key challenges QSRs are facing
The last four years haven’t exactly been kind to UK hospitality. Costs have risen almost everywhere you look, food inflation has pushed up the price of everything from beef to produce, and UK hospitality wage rises keep hitting where it hurts.
Not to mention, aggregator commissions continue to squeeze delivery margins. And with household budgets under pressure, people are eating out less often.
QSR restaurants sit in a specific spot inside all of that. When money gets tight, guests trade down. But they don't just spend less, they also become far more discerning about where the money they do spend actually goes.
For QSRs, this means:
- A higher need to protect margins. Rising food and labour costs leave less room between revenue and profit.
- More pressure to prove value. Customers still expect affordable meals, even as the cost of serving them rises.
- Less room for discounting. Promotions can drive traffic, but too many discounts can quickly eat into already-tight margins.
- More pressure to get labour right. Overstaffing hurts profitability, while understaffing can damage service and the customer experience.
- A bigger focus on site-level performance. When customers have less to spend, every site, daypart, and sales channel needs to work harder.
Recommended reading: Challenges facing QSRs and how to tackle them.
The pricing discipline that helped Burger King UK grow
The lesson from Burger King UK is simple: when costs rise, don’t chase margin percentage at the expense of volume. Protect the customer relationship, price with confidence, and focus on the cash you actually make.
Alasdair’s view is that when money gets tight, people tend to fall back on brands they already know and trust. As he puts it:
Consumers go back to brands they know, brands they love, brands they trust.
For Burger King UK, that trust has created room to raise prices without driving customers away.
But the point isn’t simply that the brand can charge more (we know that not everyone has Burger King’s brand awareness or resources). It’s knowing how much pricing headroom that trust gives you, and where pushing further starts to damage the relationship.
You need to understand where your own customers see value, how much price movement they’ll tolerate, and when another increase starts to cost you transactions.
Pricing should protect the business without undermining the reason customers choose you in the first place.
That leads to another important point Alasdair makes: cash margin matters more than percentage margin.
When every input cost is rising faster than your ability to raise prices, percentage margin will naturally come under pressure. Trying to protect it at all costs can mean pricing customers out and losing transactions.
But if you can hold onto those transactions and grow the average ticket? The actual cash contribution from each site can still increase.
In other words, don’t protect the percentage at the expense of the pound. In a cost-heavy market, volume and cash margin can matter more than a perfect-looking margin percentage.
Why restaurant labour productivity is a key part of Burger King UK’s success
Keeping labour costs under control is about getting more from the hours you already have. That’s where Burger King UK’s approach is particularly interesting.
The UK minimum wage has risen by around 50% since 2022, putting pressure on operators across the sector. Yet, according to Alasdair, Burger King UK’s labour percentage has barely moved.
The answer isn’t simply putting fewer people on the rota. It comes from getting the operation to work better: tighter prep, smarter deployment, and a product setup that lets you keep up with demand during every busy shift.
That’s the part that’s easy to overlook. Labour productivity is one of the few levers operators can keep pulling when costs outside their control keep rising. Small improvements in how each shift runs can add up to meaningful protection for the restaurant P&L over time.
Recommended reading: Want to boost your labour productivity? Here’s how.
So what does this mean for QSR operators?
Don’t start with cutting hours. Start by asking where your operation is creating unnecessary labour, where demand and deployment don’t match, and which processes are making your teams work harder than they need to.
This is where Nory’s agentic AI can help.
Nory uses your live operational data to predict how much labour you’ll need, when you’ll need it, and where. Our Forecasting Assistant predicts demand at a granular level, while the Scheduling Assistant turns that forecast into demand-based schedules.
The result is a better match between the people you have on shift and the work coming through the door, helping you protect service while keeping labour costs under control.
How government policies influence QSR performance
Operators can’t control the policy environment, but they can control how well their business responds to it. That’s an important part of Alasdair’s argument.
Alasdair is diplomatic about the wider policy picture, but the reality for operators is fairly straightforward: the businesses protecting their margins are doing so in spite of these pressures, not because the conditions are particularly favourable.
That doesn’t make the operator’s job any easier. If anything, it makes the controllable levers more important.
You can’t set the minimum wage or change the VAT rate, but you can control how accurately you forecast demand, how you schedule your teams, how you manage waste, and how consistently each site operates.
Those operational disciplines are what give operators room to absorb the costs they can’t control.
Recommended reading: Restaurant profit margins: 2026 benchmarks by restaurant type.
What operators can take from Burger King UK
The biggest takeaway from Alasdair’s approach is that margin protection means getting the fundamentals right, then improving them consistently.
Three things travel out of this conversation for any multi-site operator:
- Focus on the cash, not just the margin percentage. When costs are rising, trying to protect your percentage margin at all costs can mean losing customers and transactions. A slightly lower percentage margin can still mean more cash in the business if you’re growing sales.
- Know how much pricing headroom you actually have. Your customers might accept a price increase, but that doesn’t mean they’ll accept unlimited increases. Understand what they value, where your pricing sits and when pushing further could start costing you transactions.
- Make labour productivity a long-term priority. You won’t always be able to control wage increases, but you can control how effectively you use the hours you pay for. Small improvements in forecasting, deployment and how each shift runs can add up to significant savings over time.
Listen to the full conversation
Listen to the full episode below, which covers Alasdair's approach to running Burger King UK, the pricing discipline behind the growth, and his direct take on where UK hospitality goes from here:
Or explore more operator conversations on What's Cooking?, Nory's podcast