In one of the rarer promotional feats in recent memory, the fast food outlet KFC plans to send its new Zinger chicken burger ‘straight up into space’ with the help of a high-altitude balloon. KFC is partnering with World View, a company that makes stratollites, or high-altitude balloons, on the project.
The Zinger chicken burger is scheduled to take flight on or after June 21. The launch will be broadcast live online.
“The Zinger will travel to the stratosphere where it will stay between 60,000 and 80,000 feet above the Earth's surface for four whole days”, KFC said in a statement. The burger will return to earth and bring back telemetry data too.
KFC posted a series of tweets explaining its new campaign.
The promotional stunt for the Zinger burger comes two months after the fast food chain unveiled Rob Lowe playing Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Col. Harland Sanders in a space suit as part of an ad campaign. The ads promised to send the breaded chicken sandwich into space.
"The Stratollite was created to deliver more routine and meaningful access to space for all, and this mission allows us to give edge-of-space access to a commercial customer that would previously deem a project like this unimaginable." World View co-founder Taber MacCallum said in a statement.
The Zinger is a spicy fried chicken burger that’s hand-breaded, with mayo and lettuce. According to a report of NyTimes, it was created in 1984 for restaurants in Trinidad and Tobago, though now it is sold in more than 120 countries.
Of course, the goal of this next week’s “Zinger 1 Space Mission” is to get a lot of publicity for its new burger, epecially on social media. Twitter had fun discussing this plan:
Well this seems like a waste of money and resources....no cure for cancer but let's build a rocket and send a sandwich into outer space!
— Pyro @E3 2017 (@pyrosplayhouse)
May 31, 2017
Here's the more important question @KFC: is the Zinger capable of causing gravitational waves? We need to know. #spacesandwich
— Albert Einstein (@AlbertEinstein)
June 13, 2017
 "KFC Zinger chicken burger, KFC Zinger chicken burger in space")