Meat Marketer

The business philosophy and practice of Andrew Puzder.

- Susan Berfield and Craig Giammona

“What’s more American,” the Carl’s Jr. narrator asks in a 2015 advertisement for the Most American Thick burger, “than a girl [swimsuit model Samantha Hoopes, biting into a potato-chip-stuffed cheeseburger that’s topped with a grilled hot dog] in a bikini [camera zooms out to reveal she’s wearing a stars-and-stripes string bikini] in a hot tub [covered with stars and stripes] in a truck [a Crew Cab pickup with an American flag paint job] on an aircraft carrier [with fighter planes taking off] underneath the Statue of Liberty?” Final shot: Hoopes biting into the huge burger, then #most American.

This commercial is the marketing vision of Andrew Puzder, the chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants, owner of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, and now President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of labor. Puzder’s appeal to “young, hungry guys” and their version of what makes America great helped two struggling fast-food chains become, if not top contenders, at least contenders. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American,” Puzder, who’s 66, said of that ad to Entrepreneur magazine. “I used to hear, ‘brands take on the personality of the CEO.’ And I rarely thought that was true, but I think this one, in this case, it kind of did take on my personality.”

That personality is also what makes him one of the most Trump-like of all Trump appointments. He got the president’s attention in some of the same ways Trump got America’s. Puzder has teased competitors, casually denigrated the workforce he relies on, and rallied customers with an anti-PC snubbing of the quinoa-eating elite.