Guess the Fast Food Brand Quiz

A fast food chain buys one shape into your memory: arches, a domino, a star, an arrow. This quiz shows 20 of these marks, and you type the chain behind each one.

No card shows the brand name. Where a logo normally carries its name, the name is cut away: Carl's Jr. keeps only its star, Arby's only its hat, In-N-Out only its arrow, Shake Shack only its burger.

The first cards are the marks that every high street teaches you: the golden arches, the Domino's tile, the Pizza Hut roof.

The harder cards come from other countries. Nordsee is German, Quick is Belgian, MOS Burger and Lotteria are Japanese, Telepizza is Spanish, Red Rooster is Australian, Autogrill is Italian.

Each solved card shows the country the chain comes from.

How to play

• Just start typing. The quiz checks your answer at every keystroke. There is no submit button.
• A correct name flips its card and shows the chain's name and its country.
• You can answer in any order. The name you type solves the matching card wherever it sits on the grid.
• Everyday names count. "Dominoes" solves Domino's, and "Hardee's" solves the star card, because Carl's Jr. and Hardee's share the same star.
• Spelling is forgiving. Capitals, accents and punctuation are ignored, and frequent misspellings such as "MacDonalds" are accepted.
• The timer starts at your first keystroke and counts up. Give Up ends the run and shows every chain you missed. Progress saves automatically.

What counts in this quiz

• 20 fast food chains from seven countries.
• Every card is a symbol, never a name. Some marks are already only a symbol. The rest have the name cut off the picture.
• Burger chains, pizza chains, sandwich chains, chicken chains and one fish chain appear on the same board.
• Every logo is a freely licensed Wikimedia Commons file. Two need credit, and the credits sit under the grid.

What's not included — and why

• A chain whose logo is only its name cannot be a card. KFC, Subway, Wendy's, Popeyes, Five Guys and Dunkin' have no symbol to separate from the name, so they are left out.
• Some chains are missing for a different reason. Taco Bell, Starbucks, Chipotle, Jollibee and White Castle have no freely licensed mark, so the quiz cannot show them.
• Dairy Queen and Baskin-Robbins are left out because their mark is their own initials. The card would spell the answer.
• Sub-brands and product lines are not counted as separate cards. Only the parent mark appears.
• Two marks also appear in the Guess the Brand quiz, because a fast food board without McDonald's or Pizza Hut would be incomplete.

Good to know

• The golden arches began as real architecture. The first McDonald's buildings had two separate yellow arcs, and a 1962 redesign joined them into the M.
• The Burger King card shows the two bun halves of the 1994 logo. The buns held the company name between them from 1969 to 1999, and again from 2021.
• The three dots on the Domino's tile stand for the three stores the company had in 1969. The plan was to add one dot per new store. The plan was dropped.
• Carl's Jr. and Hardee's are one company, CKE Restaurants. Both chains use the same smiling Happy Star.
• The Pizza Hut roof is the shape of the first restaurant, built in Wichita, Kansas in 1958.
• The Jack in the Box clown began as a real object: a giant clown head on top of the drive-through speaker at the first restaurants.
• MOS in MOS Burger stands for Mountain, Ocean, Sun.
• The Arby's hat is a ten-gallon cowboy hat. The founders wanted a western feel for their roast beef sandwiches in 1964.
• Wienerschnitzel sells no schnitzel. The Californian chain sells hot dogs, and the W in the logo is the roof shape of its first A-frame stands.
• Nordsee is older than every other chain on the board. It began in 1896 as a German deep-sea fishing company, and the fish in the logo is the product.