The practice of including toys or other fun paraphernalia can be traced back to the 1970s in the United States. The original credit goes to the American fast-food chain Burger Chef, who first introduced this concept with the Funmeal in 1973 (MeTV 2018). However, in 1979, McDonalds introduced the Happy Meal with a concept almost identical to Burger Chef’s. This led to a legal dispute over the intellectual property of the concept of adding toys to (fast) food meals. Burger Chef, who tried to sue the McDonald’s chain, lost and soon after also went out of business, leaving the ever-growing fast food giant McDonald's to take the concept to a global scale. The concept has since been introduced to other fast-food chains as well, including KFC.
While some campaigns include educational additions such as books (Grossman, 2016), the majority of meal gifts are toys and gadgets (“Happy Meal,” 2024), many of which are part of a pre-existing brand. This practice is also referred to as co-branding and has, in recent years, been the dominant choice of toy-meal marketing for KFC (Du, 2022). One of these franchise toys is this Pikachu figurine. As part of the infamous and globally popular Pokémon franchise, this toy was part of a KFC kids’ meal in 2023.
Du, Y. (2022, December 27). McDonald’s VS. KFC, Which is More Successful in Marketing in China? Www.atlantis-Press.com; Atlantis Press. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-098-5_126
Grossman, S. (2016, February 3). McDonald’s Will Serve Happy Meals With Books Instead of Toys. TIME; Time. https://time.com/4206461/mcdonalds-happy-meals-books/
Happy Meal. (2024). In Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Meal
MeTV. (2018). What ever happened to the Burger Chef chain? Me-TV Chicago. https://www.metv.com/stories/what-ever-happened-to-the-burger-chef-chain
ABetterTime. (2024). Burger Chef and Jeff Fun Meal with Monster Fun Record [Online image]. In Etsy. https://www.etsy.com/listing/724907851/burger-chef-and-jeff-fun-meal-with
[In Annotation] KFC. (2023). KFC logo-image [Online image]. In Global.kfc.com. https://global.kfc.com/images/logo.svg.