There's a Neon Genesis Evangelion burger coming to KFC
KFC Hong Kong is selling a purple Unit-01 burger through August 31. It’s the newest entry in a food-collab history that goes back nearly 30 years, and the one franchise where a canned-coffee sponsorship is literally part of the plot.
There is now a purple burger shaped, in spirit, like a giant killer robot.
KFC Hong Kong launched a Neon Genesis Evangelion menu on July 23, running through August 31, and the centerpiece is exactly the kind of thing this franchise attracts.
What’s on the menu
The A1 Purple Awakening Feast runs HK$62, about $7.91.
At its center is the Purple AT Field Spicy Chicken Burger — mildly spicy chicken, pickles, purple onions, and a bright purple bun modeled on Unit-01, the series’ signature Evangelion. Around it: a Purple Sweet Potato Egg Tart topped with marshmallow, and Crispy Purple Sweet Potato Balls with an “LCL-inspired” filling, LCL being the orange fluid the show’s pilots breathe inside their mechs. Appetizing.
Each set comes with a random character card — Shinji, Rei, Asuka, Mari, or Kaworu, plus three secret cards, eight to collect. There’s a merch line, and KFC’s Causeway Bay flagship has been redecorated in full Eva livery.
Standard collab playbook. What’s not standard is how long this particular series has been running the play.
Nearly 30 years of this
Evangelion debuted in 1995 and has been attached to food ever since. Fans joke that it has done “just about every possible collab,” and the receipts back them up.
The through-line isn’t fast food, though. It’s coffee.
The coffee is in the show
Here’s the detail that makes Evangelion‘s food history different from every other anime’s.
UCC Coffee with Milk — a canned coffee — appears inside the original anime. Characters drink it on screen. That on-screen placement turned UCC into the unofficial favorite of Eva fans, and UCC has cashed it in repeatedly ever since.
The first cans, six of them featuring the cast, shipped in 1997 around The End of Evangelion. The partnership then came back for the Rebuild film tetralogy, with heavy in-film product placement and multiple new can sets across 2007 to 2021, some sold through Eva-themed vending machines. A recent, possibly final round hit shelves on April 20.
So the sponsorship isn’t attached to the show. It’s in the show, and has been for almost three decades. Try to name another anime where the soft drink is a canon element.
Then McDonald’s finally showed up
For all that history, one obvious partner held out for 30 years.
McDonald’s Japan did its first-ever Evangelion collaboration only at the end of 2024, teased on December 17 with the Eva font and the words “Project Eva” and “Khara,” the studio’s name. Given how many tie-ins this series had already done, McDonald’s being late was itself the story.
It committed hard once it arrived. The rollout started with transforming collectible mecha figures, then in January 2025 came three “Evangelion Burgers” themed to the show’s AT Fields — the Cheese Double Teriyaki, a beef-and-garlic-mayo build, and a Mexican Cheese Chicken.
The promo is where it got unhinged. McDonald’s cut a trailer using real footage from the original anime, restaged so Shinji, Rei, and Asuka fight a burger-shaped Angel and a “Mac Eva,” with the SEELE council’s ominous black monoliths replaced by boxes of fries. Fans caught Shinji’s dubbed line: “I mustn’t eat it! I mustn’t eat it!”
If you know the source, that’s a genuinely funny thing to do to it.
Why Evangelion, specifically
There’s a reason a bleak 1995 art-house mecha show about depression and human instrumentality keeps ending up on fast-food trays.
It’s one of the most recognizable anime ever made, its imagery is instantly legible — the purple-and-green Unit-01, the color-coded pilots, that font — and its fanbase is old enough now to have disposable income and deep enough to buy eight cards to collect five characters. The collectible-card mechanic and the limited-time window do the rest.
The tonal gap is the joke, and everyone’s in on it. A franchise this heavy being this game to sell you a purple burger is why the collabs land instead of curdling.
Where the KFC one sits
Against nearly 30 years of coffee cans, McDonald’s burgers, and countless smaller tie-ins, KFC’s purple Unit-01 burger is a modest, regional entry — Hong Kong and Macau only, six weeks, gone by September.
It’s also KFC leaning on a lane it clearly likes. This is the same chain that ran a Gundam fried-chicken bucket and a Monster Hunter meal in the past year alone.
The purple burger will sell out, the cards will hit resale, and a series that ended, definitively, in 2021 will keep showing up at the counter. Evangelion stopped making episodes years ago. It never stopped making lunch.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Dexerto — the KFC Hong Kong Evangelion menu details, pricing, the collectible cards, and the merch and flagship-restaurant makeover
Japan Today / grape Japan — the UCC Coffee tie-in history, the six-can 1997 set, the Rebuild-era placements, and the April 20 release
Evangelion Virtual Museum — the UCC partnership tracing back to The End of Evangelion and the in-anime appearances
Siliconera / DesignRush — McDonald’s Japan’s first-ever Evangelion collab, the December 2024 tease, and the “Project Eva / Khara” reveal
Screen Rant / EvaGeeks / Sportskeeda — the January 2025 AT Field burger lineup, the transforming mecha figures, and the anime-footage promo with the burger Angel and fries monoliths