NEW YORK: Burger King is hoping to set aside its rivalry with McDonald’s, at least for a day.

The fast-food chain is reaching out to its long-time competitor with an unusual proposal: Create a hybrid of each company’s signature burger — Big Mac and Whopper — and then sell it at a pop-up restaurant in Atlanta for one day. The profits would go to an organisation that promotes world peace.

Call it “McWhopper” diplomacy.

“We’re being completely transparent with our approach because we want them to take it seriously,” Fernando Machado, senior vice-president for global brand management at Burger King, said in a statement on Tuesday. “It would be amazing if McDonald’s agrees to do this.”

Burger King created a website, mcwhopper.com, that includes a proposed recipe for the McWhopper. The sandwich has six ingredients from the Big Mac (including special sauce, all-beef patty and cheese), and six from the Whopper (including flame-grilled patty, onion and pickles).

To draw attention to its gambit, the company took out full-page advertisements yesterday in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, the hometown paper for Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald’s.

The event would be held on Sept 21, known as World Peace Day. The proceeds would benefit Peace One Day, a non-profit that wants to make that date an “annual day of global unity, a day of intercultural cooperation on a scale that humanity has never known”. — Bloomberg

This article first appeared in digitaledge Daily, on August 27, 2015.