Shake Shack UAE draws fire over flawed South Korean flag on World Cup merchandise

Shake Shack outlets in the UAE are facing criticism after distributing World Cup merchandise featuring an incorrectly drawn South Korean flag.

Seo Gyeong-deok, a professor at Sungshin Women's University, posted photos of the merchandise on his SNS on Tuesday, saying a Korean resident of Abu Dhabi had tipped him off. "A customer who purchased a Shake Shack World Cup set meal received merchandise with a wrongly drawn South Korean flag," he wrote.

The merchandise, shaped like a hand, displayed the flags of all 48 nations competing in the 2026 North and Central America World Cup. On the South Korean flag, the curved lines of the taeguk symbol were rendered incorrectly, and the four trigrams — geon, gon, gam and ri — that appear in the corners were missing entirely.

"It is unacceptable for a global hamburger chain like Shake Shack to make such a mistake with a national flag, which is a symbol of a country," Seo said. "I don't know how much stock remains, but I plan to send a letter of complaint to Shake Shack's headquarters soon and demand that distribution of the merchandise stop immediately."

Seo said Shake Shack had been ramping up its marketing around this year's World Cup, making the error all the more glaring. "Producing and distributing merchandise like this to consumers is an act that diminishes the very meaning of the World Cup," he said.

"Any company that truly considers itself a global enterprise must first make sure it has an accurate understanding of basic information about the countries where it does business," he added.