When asked about the origins of McSenget, the creators of the Instagram account told Bored Panda:
“We used to go to McDonald's regularly after our band practices, and we’d often end up with senget (tilted in Malay) burgers. This is especially annoying when it comes to Filet-O-Fish—you won't be able to align the burger without destroying it when the buns are so soft and the cheese practically 'glues' the parts together. With that, we’d often end up having a less enjoyable experience as we may have bites where there is no cheese or even the fish.
Since then, we started a Facebook album as a venture to document the types of burgers we get whenever we order McDonald's, both the senget ones and the perfect ones (super rare). Eventually, we decided to shift to Instagram as McSenget to share our laughter and pain with a bigger crowd.”
“Followers usually submit their entries via DMs, tagging us in their IG stories or via email,” the team of McSenget told us. “We prefer to have entries with multiple photos—photo of the burger in the box, and when they are picked up (no munching before that please). This helps us to determine if the burgers are intentionally altered in order to be featured (yes, we do go into CSI mode to determine the authenticity of out-of-this-world burgers). We do receive a number of submissions on a daily basis, and we get about 3-5 bad burgers each day. As we are Singapore-based, we have many local submissions, but we are also starting to see more submissions across the globe.”
McSenget shared that for their 100th post, they have hunted down the top 5 outlets in Singapore with the highest incidence of senget burgers based on fan submission: “We ordered the most senget burgers from these outlets on the same day to judge for ourselves. It was really fun and some outlets really never fail!”
Like the team mentioned, Filet-O-Fish is usually the worst burger, but it’s sure not the only one: “Every burger seems to have a signature way to mess up—like how McSpicy usually comes with lettuce scattered around the box. We also started noticing a new trend—Cheese Slap, where the cheese somehow ends up ON the burger instead of being inside the burger. It is really funny because there's really nothing else you can do but to enjoy that 1 bite full of cheese.”
McSenget's team consists of 6 people, ranging from their mid-20s to early 30s: “Our common interests are burgers (of course!), and laughing through our pain. We all have our full-time jobs and are running this page as our interest.” Following the success of their Instagram account, McSenget has even launched their merch: “We started selling merch since July, featuring the very first cheese slap burger we received. We will produce more merch in time to come!”
