Deja Vu

They’re Not That Good

Tags:

Bahamas,

food,

McDonald's,

Ray Kroc

“Police: Youth Stabbed Over Big Mac in the Bahamas,” AP Wire, Aug. 19, 2009.

NASSAU, Bahamas -- Bahamian police allege a 16-year-old boy stabbed a younger companion in the neck and back during an argument over a hamburger, gravely wounding him.

Assistant Police Superintendent Paul Rolle says the older boy stabbed the 14-year-old with a knife during a disagreement over a Big Mac sandwich they bought at McDonald's shortly after departing a beachfront nightclub in Nassau early Tuesday morning.

The younger boy is listed in serious condition at a local hospital.

Rolle said Wednesday that detectives are searching for the suspect. He said authorities are trying to determine if the boys were under the influence of alcohol and if the nightclub admitted the minors.

Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, by Ray Kroc and Robert Anderson, 1987.
Dick and Mac McDonald opened the first McDonald's restaurant in San Bernardino, Calif., in 1940. Ray Kroc opened a franchise in Des Plaines, Ill., in 1955, and bought out the McDonald brothers in 1965.

During the Christmas holidays in 1972, I happened to be visiting in Santa Barbara, and I got a call from Herb Peterson, our operator there, who said he had something to show me. He wouldn’t give me a clue as to what it was. He didn’t want me to reject it out of hand, which I might have done, because it was a crazy idea—a breakfast sandwich. It consisted of an egg that had been formed in a Teflon circle, with the yolk broken, and was dressed with a slice of cheese and a slice of grilled Canadian bacon. This was served open-face on a toasted and buttered English muffin. I boggled a bit at the presentation. But then I tasted it, and I was sold. Wow! I wanted to put this item into all of our stores immediately. Realistically, of course, that was impossible. It took us nearly three years to get the egg sandwich fully integrated into our system. Fred Turner’s wife, Patty, came up with the name that helped make it an immediate hit—Egg McMuffin.

The advent of Egg McMuffin opened up a whole new area of potential business for McDonald’s, the breakfast trade. We went after it like the Sixth Fleet going into action. It was exhilarating to see the combined forces of our research and development people, our marketing and advertising experts, and our operations and supply specialists all concentrating on creating a program for catering to the breakfast trade. There were a great many problems to overcome. Some of them were new to us, because we were dealing with new kinds of products. Pancakes,. for example, have to be offered if you intend to promote a complete breakfast menu. But they have an extremely short holding time, and this forced us to devise a procedure for “cooking to order” during periods of low customer count. Our food assembly lines, so swift and efficient for turning out hamburgers and French fries, had to be geared down and realigned to produced items for the breakfast trade. Then, after all the planning and all the working out of supply and production problems, it remained for the individual operator to figure out whether to adopt breakfast in his store. It meant longer hours for him, of course, and he’d probably have to hire more crew members and give the ones he had additional training. Consequently, the breakfast program is growing at a very moderate rate. But I can see it catching on across the country, and I can visualize extensions for a lot of stores, such as brunch on Sunday.

I keep a number of experimental menu additions in the works all the time. Some of them now being tested in selected stores may find their way into general use. Others, for a variety of reasons, will never make it. We have a complete test kitchen and experimental lab on my ranch, where all of our products are tested; this is in addition to the creative facility in Oak Brook. Fred Turner has a tendency to look askance at any new menu ideas. He’ll usually try to put them down with some wisecrack such as, “That may be all right, but when are we going to start serving grilled bananas? We could put a little container of maple syrup on the side, and maybe for dinner we could serve them flaming.” Such sarcasm doesn’t bother me.

• Email /
• Print /
• Comment now