The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/menu/burger/

132•bckygldstn•1h ago

Comments

fontain•1h ago

https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/4600/

The Bai Egg Cheeseburger achieved more than slightly askew, it is defying gravity.

ertgbnm•1h ago

It's going for a rendition of the leaning tower of Lire.

ZeWaka•1h ago

No way they didn't prop that one up behind the burger.

wavefunction•1h ago

noone says you can't use industrial adhesives imperceptible to the advertised eye

yk•1h ago

I've seen an interview with a food stylist and she pointed out that when putting pins and needles into a burger, then you have to pay real attention to that burger because you have a really great looking burger, full with pins and needles.

dhosek•1h ago

Oh man, my son would go nuts for that burger.

pimlottc•1h ago

I would imagine this is to make them look less machine-perfect and more "home-made"

Loughla•1h ago

If that marketing works on anyone they need to be examined. McDonald's is the definition of machine repeatability.

Except with pickles. They never get the pickles on the actual burger.

john_strinlai•1h ago

>Except with pickles. They never get the pickles on the actual burger

there should be some sort of named law (in the "law of headlines" sense, not legal sense) about mcdonalds and pickles.

i dont like pickles. i ask for no pickles. i always receive pickles. the people that want them? too bad, they put them on mine instead apparently

jldugger•1h ago

One of the benefits of the move to app ordering is that I know for certain the order-taker got it right. And I can bookmark the custom order for later reuse.

Now it's just down to the kitchen to fulfill the order correctly, and while it's not 100% it's a lot, lot better.

Macha•1h ago

And of course whoever set up the menu on the app to have programmed in the appropriate option in the first place.

mabster•1h ago

It's always the kitchen for me across food places (in Australia). Ending up with pickles when I removed them. Ending up with coke zero instead of coke. But the worst is ending up with anything mock meat!

qwertyuiop_•38m ago

Imagine ordering online late a night from a hotel room and the MCD missing my required condiment ketchup with the order.

tkgally•1h ago

That's my guess, too. I live in Japan and eat at fast food places from time to time. One feature of McDonald's is that the food preparation area is almost always visible from the customer area; I can see the people assembling the burgers, handling the fries, etc. At Yoshinoya and other domburi places, even though the shop is much smaller than a McDonald's, I am usually unable to see the person actually putting the rice and toppings into the bowls.

I suspect that efficiency of layout is the top priority in both cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if McDonald's is also consciously trying to show that their food is human-prepared, both in the store design and in their food photos.

TurdF3rguson•6m ago

It's about communication, the cashier needs to be able to shout "I need a Big Mac no pickles" and have the grill person hear it.

The new ones near me now have touch menu that customers enter and swipe payment instead of cashiers and the grill area is no longer visible.

jokethrowaway•1h ago

Generating media attention or protecting from Japanese regulations?

I wonder if it's related to their strict rules on realistic pictures for advertising products

jdorfman•1h ago

I believe it has to do with

https://boingboing.net/2026/04/08/japans-truth-in-packaging-...

ZeWaka•1h ago

https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/2303/e...

>No Entrepreneur may make a ... representation where the quality, standard or any other particular relating to the

>content of goods or services is portrayed to general consumers as being much better than that of the actual goods or services

Fwirt•1h ago

To me the buns still look far too perfect and fluffy. I don't know if I've ever received a wrapped McDonald's hamburger that hasn't been smashed flat to some extent, with cracks in the bun. The ones that come in boxes fare a little better but they still look as if they've weathered some turbulence.

qmarchi•1h ago

At least, in Japan, they're generally as advertised.

bschwindHN•47m ago

I'll admit to McDonald's Japan being a guilty pleasure of mine. Most things I get are pretty close to the picture. It's not perfect of course, but it's McDonald's, I'm not exactly expecting gourmet food and presentation. The fries kick ass though, I almost always get them hot and perfectly golden brown.

taeric•1h ago

Honestly, this looks far more like a stylistic choice that the company thought was fine? And... it is? It actually gave me a bit of a smile. :D

jmcgough•1h ago

It isn't showing anything that would otherwise be hidden, I think this is a stylistic decision. Looks cute and more natural to me.

raincole•54m ago

I don't think so. Mos Burder and Burger King's websites don't look like that.

https://www.mos.jp/menu/category/?c_id=1

https://www.burgerking.co.jp/menu

junon•13m ago

Isn't that more about size? Instagram video seems to corroborate that.

jhack•1h ago

Wonder if this is due to Japan’s marketing laws? Doing it this way exposes more of what’s between the bread.

squidsoup•1h ago

It's just burger wabi sabi.

glhaynes•46m ago

This seems the most likely explanation to me.

It's just much more visually interesting than a page full of perfect burgers. Each one looks like a unique thing from the real world; they don't "look AI", as the kids say these days.

platinumrad•44m ago

You guys learn one term...

observationist•32m ago

Burger chizutsugi needs to be a thing.

crazygringo•1h ago

Some of them, it seems like it could be to show the sauce more clearly:

https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/4530/

But others, it's just inexplicable:

https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/1010/

Burger King isn't doing this though (close the two popups to see the menu):

https://www.burgerking.co.jp/menu

Is it some kind of trendy style? It does feel kinda... cute.

peddling-brink•1h ago

Honestly, it’s adorable and I love it.

wahnfrieden•1h ago

It's to get people on social media posting about it so more people go look at it out of curiosity. Result is lots of people looking at the McD's menu.

goosejuice•1h ago

Yes, my guess is that this is the result of a few food stylists or a single agency holding an opinion. It's not at all unusual as far as styling food goes, but maybe so for fast food.

wahnfrieden•1h ago

BK is doing it in the very first one.

recursivecaveat•1h ago

I know that burgers are usually stacked to tilt away from the camera in photography to show the contents. (ie the bottom bun is laterally closer to the camera than the top in a downward view) I don't know why you would stack them to the side because it's more obvious, and in this case you can hardly see anything different at such a shallow angle. It's almost like they stacked them and then took the picture from a randomly selected angle or something.

colpabar•1h ago

I don’t think this is a japanese thing. The way they are askew feels familiar; I have definitely seen food that looks weirdly “off” on other menus. It’s probably just a way to stand out, like how so many models have gaps between their two front teeth. You’re gonna remember the one that’s different.

strogonoff•1h ago

Often (not always) the top bun is the worst offender, but it’s most certainly not just about the buns: if you look closely, the unique characteristic of Japanese McDonalds (separating it both from McDonalds in other countries as well as from other similar chains in Japan) is that in each photo every burger layer (bun, meat, lettuce, etc.) is offset from the previous layer by a seemingly-random factor on its X axis.

I’m sure discussions like this is exactly why they did it. Considering other chains in Japan don’t do this, it clearly has nothing with regulations (unless those are really unevenly enforced).

panny•53m ago

Why are Japanese burgers significantly cheaper than the ones in the US? A Big Mac is 500 yen, that's like $3.

https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/1210/

Big Macs haven't been that cheap since 2008 in the US.

TheGRS•49m ago

If you've been to Japan any time recently you'd probably know that just about everything is cheaper in Japan, especially food and drink. I've been twice, most recently back in October, and I'm blown away by how relatively affordable things are. USD goes a long long way in Japan.

Oddly I could not find any cheaply priced Japanese Whiskey, and I looked around quite a bit. It was all about as much or more than what I could get it for in the states.

nine_k•17m ago

Japan's salaries are much lower than those in the US. Even adjusted to PPP, the median salary in Japan is still significantly lower that in the US. Few would be able to afford food at US price levels.

gandreani•46m ago

I don't know about McD's exactly, but food in general is very cheap in Japan compared to the U.S.

Source: I watch a lot of behind the scenes restaurant videos on YouTube and I'm always shocked at the prices. Most dishes are cheaper than if I were to go to the grocery store and cook it myself...

chuckadams•41m ago

Three decades of deflation will do that. That ended a few years ago, but there's clearly lingering effects.

quickthrowman•15m ago

Probably like 50%+ of the cost of restaurant food is labor and rent. Labor and rent are cheaper in Japan than in the US.

jnellis•44m ago

When I was in cooking school there was a brief lesson in photo presentation. For something like a burger you would skew from front to back, going upward to the top bun to show the layers better but it wasn't visually noticeable that it was skewed on the photo. This seems like the same thing except the ai has chosen the side view instead of the frontal view, thus making the skew very noticeable.

tbeseda•42m ago

I just want to note how fast this page is.

806kB transferred. 766ms to finished. I hit the DFW AWS CloudFront pop from here.

Similar page for BK https://www.burgerking.co.jp/menu

31MB transferred. 6.5s to finished. Hits the DEN pop (but it's a "miss").

I am in Colorado. uBlock is on.

Even if you don't count the 7.5MB of fonts on the BK page, that's wild.

wombat-man•22m ago

they gotta make sure you learn about those burgers as fast as possible.

mr_toad•18m ago

It’s worrying, or perhaps just sad, that 766ms for an initial page load is considered especially noteworthy. Six thousand milliseconds is just awful.

gl-prod•14m ago

But it feels snappy.

bcrl•8m ago

McDonalds actually seems to have learned to take latency seriously. When their touch screen ordering systems were first deployed, the delay between tapping on an item or button was quite noticeable. These days the systems respond nearly instantaneously. I'm very glad there are people inside such a large organization that pay attention to that aspect of usability.

Now if only every other website on the internet would learn that latency matters...

rapind•3m ago

Except they make you tap 2-3 times more than it takes to make your selections. That's business guys though, not the devs.

Do you want to add one of [x]... No. How about now, add one of [x]... No. Do you want to round up your total to [n]... No. Do you want to eat in, even though we'll still put it in a takeaway bag so this option is really just the equivalent of a close door button on an elevator in that it does nothing except placate you?... Yes.

tpurves•38m ago

This is such a dastardly psychological trick. Being slightly aswew really hard to fight the subconscious urge to reach out and 'fix' them. I almost want to rush out to a nearest McDonald's right now and buy one of these burgers so that I can make sure that it's buns are aligned properly....

evanjrowley•27m ago

I like how it makes the burgers look more "laid back", like some cool sunglasses-wearing skater/surfer dude leaning back, or a pin-up model whose pose invites you in. Standing up straight is for the man and that's not how I want my burgers to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man

robot-wrangler•5m ago

No idea why we're discussing burgers or the man, but pretty funny to learn the phrase goes back to freaking BCE

NathanielBaking•26m ago

Anyone notice that the plain burger is only 190 Yen ($1.20) vs $3.99 in the US. https://www.mac-menus.com/

TurdF3rguson•14m ago

I remember when they were $0.49

nothrabannosir•12m ago

> The Big Mac Index is a price index published since 1986 by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and providing a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. It "seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible."[1] The index compares the relative price worldwide to purchase the Big Mac, the flagship hamburger sold at McDonald's restaurants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

cammikebrown•10m ago

Food in Japan is incredibly cheap. I never paid more than $6 for noodles, sometimes just $2. In the US it’d be $12-$20 (and worse).

yen223•6m ago

this is incredibly weird to read. once upon a time japan was notorious for its high food prices

InMice•22m ago

Why doesnt USA get an egg cheeseburger :(

yanko•20m ago

I relate McDonald's with the famous movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me And avoid at any cost

UqWBcuFx6NV4r•18m ago

OK.

sp0rk•16m ago

You should check out "Counter-claims" section of your link, especially the last paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Counter-claims

timmg•15m ago

FWIW, there is some controversy around the “methodology” and honesty in that film. Not saying you should change your view of McDonald’s, but possibly of that movie.

swivelmaster•14m ago

You shouldn't. It was revealed later that Morgan Spurlock, the star of the movie, was also secretly drinking himself to death while he was making the documentary. Not to shame an addiction OR defend McDonalds too much here, but being a raging alcoholic and blaming your health problems on hamburgers and french fries on a massive public stage is/was extraordinarily irresponsible.

JCTheDenthog•3m ago

The maker of that documentary was a massive alcoholic, that's what caused his liver problems, not eating McDonald's.

rappatic•18m ago

OP, I love not just that you noticed this, but that you thought to post it here too. HN is the best.

Dwedit•9m ago

A video posted by McDonalds Canada reveals how they stage the burgers for photographing them. They shift each layer backwards (bun, meat, etc) so that the ingredients of the layer are more visible when photographed. The top bun ends up being a few inches backward compared to the bottom bun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8

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