The lncredible Growth of America’s Leading Fast-Food Chain — and What’s Beneath the Bread.
The (McDonald’s) Bun Also Rises
The phenomenon occurs in hundreds of American cities and in several hundred cities abroad: the arches, shaped like up-thrust bosoms, Iight up early in the morning and do not dim till late at night; they cast a bewitching golden glow on the millions of people who pass daily beneath them. The crowds of people speak a Babel of tongues: in Japan it’s “humbuggah”; in Costa Rica, “hamburguesa”; in France it’s “ambehrgguh”; in Germany, “hommboorger.” But everywhere this mysterious word is understood and identified with the nursery-rhyme name of a giant concern that is America’s leading fast-food chain: McDonald’s, the hamburger empire on which the bun never sets.
Currently, nearly 3,600 stands display the emblazoned name and Golden Arches (over five hundred have been built this past year); McDonald’s can be found today in some twenty countries outside the U.S. (there are fifty-two in Tokyo alone); and the giant burger corporation has forecast that under present conditions the planet could easily accommodate ten thousand more of its outlets.
McDonald’s finds it must resort to outsize statistics in order to convey an idea of its size, especially the mass of foodstuffs that move across its spotless, stainless-steel counters. With the sale of the six-billionth burger, for instance, it was revealed that a total of 460,938,356 pounds of flour had gone into the making of the buns, and that hauling the flour for these buns required the service of 3.717 stripped-down 747 jumbo jets. At the same time, the ketchup and mustard served on six billion patties was enough to filI the 46,770-gallon tanks on 224 of the giant 747’s. In addition, McDonald’s used over one and a half billion pounds of potatoes for making french fries and over eighty-four million pounds of cheese for cheeseburgers and Big Macs. With the sale of its twelve-billionth burger two years ago, McDonald’s claimed this total stacked in one pile would form a pyramid 783 times larger than Khufu’s. McDonald’s computed the area required to accommodate all the cattie — standing flank-to-flank — that had gone into the making of these twelve billion hamburgers, and came up with an area the size of Greater London. Finally, mercifully, amidst this surreal landscape was implanted a human, the McDonald’s statistic become flesh: a man who ate a hamburger every five minutes for 114,000 years.
McDonald’s current sale of hamburgers, as the giant red golden-lettered score-boards testify from every company outlet, stands at seventeen bi Ilion. But even more decorative are the figures of the corporate bottom line — the magic margin of patty profits, sales, and earnings that denote the more significant elements of success. Of the $31 billion Americans spent last year in restaurants, McDonald’s took in over $2 billion, a phenomenal 6 percent of the total market! While the food dollar steadily shrinks and shoppers cautiously pick through supermarket shelves. McDonald’s 1974 sales were up 28 percent over the year before — a whopping $524 million. (But in previous years McDonald’s has done even better, averaging a 40 percent increase in sales and earnings.)
In keeping with these triumphs, the hamburger corporation now calls itself McDonald’s System, Inc., and today this system employs 150,000 teenagers as kitchen and counter workers, making McDonald’s the country’s biggest employer of youth. It buys 1 percent of all the beef wholesaled in the U.S.; it is America’s biggest buyer of fish for its Filet-o’-Fish sandwiches, as well as America’s biggest buyer of potatoes for its trench fries. And even more amazingly, the system’s prodigious record of growth has persisted through the two decades of its existence; McDonald’s staggering figures and market penetration have been unmatched by any restaurant chain, which recently led one Wall Street analyst to envision an awesome and frightening portend of the future:
“Before long,” wrote Milton Moskowitz in his column the “Money Tree,” “McDonald’s is going to be feeding all of us.”
But what’s beneath the bun?
What kind of diet shall we all be eating before long?
The logical place to start this inquiry is at Hamburger Central, the headquarters of the McDonald’s Corporation in Oak Brook, Illinois, a super-sleek corporate enclave in Chicago’s western suburbs; low-slung, low-profile architecture dominates the town where McDonald’s neighbors are giant companies like Sears, Armour, Stauffer, and Sheraton. Hamburger Central blends in with this background well; it is eight stories high, wedge-shaped, with four wings-lonely gusty colonnades confront the windswept emptiness of a vast space called McDonald’s Plaza.
But it soon becomes clear that inside Hamburger Central nobody is very interested in discussing the nutritive value of the McDonald’s meal. It’s not as exciting as talking about billions of hamburgers flying around the world in jumbo jets, the patty pyramids of antiquity, or European capitals filled with McDonald’s ghostly cattle. Characteristically, all questions on the subject are referred to the advertising director, who has a sign in his office that reads, EARLY TO BED, EARLY TO RISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE. As spokesman for McDonald’s most delicate and least publicized property, the ad director is uncomfortable with the subject.
He is bulky, round-shouldered, and wears a clear look of consternation. But he says that in recent years McDonald’s has done three studies of its own hamburger — one of which was made public (the “Trazeman Study,” more of which later).
What happened to the other two? Can they be seen?
McDonald’s advertising director reddens and sputters; petulantly he asks, “What do you need them for?”
Outside the advertising chief’s office the story is the same. Nobody at Hamburger Central is overly concerned about the nutritional value of the hamburgers, shakes, and fries. Everyone is too busy. Their tasks are myriad, for at Hamburger Central re sides the control that makes the thousands of McDonald’s stands tick in harmony, turning out patties and profits, consistency and sameness in product and service from coast to coast.
From purchasing, supply, and marketing to law, finance, and real estate, every facet of McDonald’s worldwide operations comes under Hamburger Central’s four colonnaded wings; it oversees one of America’s largest advertising budgets, high-priced consultants of every variety, test kitchens, and legions of managers, inspectors, executives, and an army of young hamburger workers. Hamburger Central’s specialized lobes are attuned to every winking grill and sputtering french fry in every McDonald’s kitchen; they’re attuned to zoning laws, management, competition, labor unrest, union activities, university research, city hall, state legislatures, Capitol Hill, and even the White House. Hamburger Central controls a thorough and sophisticated public-relations apparatus that reaches into every McDonald’s community; it runs a $2 million training academy known as Hamburger University; and it operates an ever growing number of hamburger-oriented Disneyland-style playgrounds for children, each one called McDonaldland.
Instead of a Department of Nutrition, Hamburger Central has the “open office” and the “think tank” — both part of the “total-concept environment,” a mind-boggling interior design which McDonald’s has hailed as the corporate look of the space age. Since its doors swung wide five years ago, the open office has been visited by hosts of curious sightseers, guests, and VIP’s; by industrial designers, experimental psychologists and management consultants; by reporters and media people, including TV crews from Sweden and Japan; and they have all wandered through the building gazing at a series of office floors submerged in deep orange carpet where Hamburger Central’s 400 employees work in a vastness devoid of obstruction: for in the open office there are no doors and no walls; each employee sits in a “work unit” called a task response module (TRM); lost, seemingly weightless in 33,000 square feet of open space.
But in the open office, the subject of nutrition runs into unexpected barriers, or else it dissipates in space. There’s the think tank, however, an ideal place to mull the patty substance.
The think tank (which added another $100,000 to McDonald’s space bill) is located on the seventh floor of Hamburger Central. Pitched like an odd-looking tent in a distant office enclosure, it is conical-shaped, made of a kind of hardspun soundproof canvas; its entrance shows a panel of signal lights and a hermetically sealed door like the hatch of a spacecraft, and inside the think tank there are soft-albumen walls and a nine-foot-diameter, pink, fleshy, undulating water bed from which McDonald’s executives regularly launch themselves into high mental orbit — or, as frequently happens, into deep dreamy sleep. Several departments have held meetings here and advertising and PR people have used it for brainstorming sessions. The top faculty of Hamburger University has met here. McDonald’s youthful president has used it. But as far as can be determined, no McDonald’s staffer has been immersed in the think tank to grapple with questions about the fundamental nature of the hamburger substance: whether or not the McDonald’s meal provides proper nourishment.
To no one is this type of debate more irksome than to McDonald’s founder and chairman Ray A. Kroc, the seventy-three-year-old, plump, spry, dapper Hamburger King whose $500 million fortune (a conservative estimate) ranks him among America’s dozen richest tycoons. Ray Kroc has never been in the think tank. “These young people nowadays have problems,” he says indulgently. “I don’t need a think tank. I put two words down on paper and I talk for hours.”
After spending a lifetime as a travelling salesman, selling anything from Florida real estate to paper cups and milkshake mixers, Ray Kroc finally struck it rich at sixty selling McDonald’s franchises. Since then he has been showered with honors and recognition. He has received the Horatio Alger trophy (“Towards the enhancing of the American tradition of overcoming obstacles to achieve success through diligence, industry, perseverance”). He has received perhaps more Good Scout awards than any other living American. Kroc has been named American of the Year by Lions International, Mr. Pickle, and an honorary citizen of Idaho, the potato state. He has been Marketing Man of the Year and the food service industry honored him with its Golden Plate award. But amidst all these triumphs Ray Kroc has never been distinguished with an award for nutrition.
“So you want to have perfection in diet?” McDonald’s founder fumed when the subject came up during an interview a few years ago. “Do you want to live in a laboratory?” he asked scornfully. “After all,” he reasoned, “you can’t just live on pills!”
There is still one place, however, where you might expect basic questions about the hamburger meal to be answered. This is Hamburger University, McDonald’s own ground round educational complex in Elk Grove Village, about a twenty-minute ride from Hamburger Central. Of white Mediterranean-style architecture with a campus of shade trees, a reflecting pool, and grassy knolls, Hamburger U stands just off the town’s busy main road, a beacon of higher hamburger knowledge.
McDonald’s Elk Grove institute is the home of Hamburger Science, a discipline first formulated back in 1955 by Ray Kroc when in one of his first McDonald’s stands he revealed his patty theories to a young grillman by the name of Fred Turner. As Fred Turner has since become McDonald’s forty-year-old multimillionaire president, so the science has evolved into a multi-volume work known as the McDonald’s Operating Manual, HU’s standard textbook which provides chapter and verse of every conceivable aspect of running a McDonald’s restaurant. There is not a word about nutrition in it, though, or any other instruction with which HU grads might counsel patrons about the possible deficiencies of the McDonald’s diet.
For Ray Kroc, the basics of the hamburger science had been as simple as meat and potatoes — hamburger and trench fries — and one other item that he thought was necessary: clean toilets. Happy rumbling plumbing, the music of the privy, was to accompany the all-American meal. These principles, though refined and grown ever more detailed, are still at the core of Hamburger U, which was founded seven years ago to train the legion of overseers required by the restlessly expanding McDonald’s chain — franchisees, managers, assistant managers, field inspectors, regional, subregional, and area supervisors. The school bristles with all the trappings of a busy academic mill; with the latest in audiovisual teaching aids; with cutaway models of grills, triers, shake and beverage machines; with ringing bells, busy classrooms, quiet tutorials, and darkened auditoriums strobed by silver flashes of overhead projection screens. Every month a new crop of several hundred graduates are awarded the BH and MH degrees — the Bachelor and Master of Hamburgerology. HU has over ten thousand alumni spread throughout the McDonald’s empire as well as in competing fast-food chains. It has a faculty consisting of a dean, assistant deans, full professors, and senior professors. HU has a foreign-student program (with translation booths), seminars on real estate and law, and it even awards honorary degrees (one was given to Johnny Cash).
The full HU course can run anywhere from ten days to three weeks, and when the trained cadres stream out to take their place under the far-flung Golden Arches, they have been schooled in all the minutiae of hamburger knowledge. They have studied not only the leaders of the McDonald’s meal — Big Mac, Quarter Pounder, shake, and fries; but they have also covered everything from management decision and basic refrigeration to teenagers and cash control; they have attended lectures ranging from buns to filet/steamers and fries/shortening; they have completed workshops on grill calibration, equipment care, and ventilation; they have learned where to buy a Ronald McDonald watch and how to extract the “recommended yield” from each product used; they have watched an inspirational film called New Dimensions, and they have watched training films with titles like Big Mac,Fish and Tartar Sauce, and A Lot of People Sell Hamburgers.
Nevertheless, many observers find America’s biggest-selling meal less than inspirational. Some of these critics have been more charitable than one California doctor who recommended the “air between the bun” as the most wholesome part of the McDonald’s burger. Generally, however, most experts lump McDonald’s menu in the category of “junk food.” Author and TV chef Julia Child, like most of her colleagues, dismisses it as “nothing but calories,” the biggest portion of it bread. Dr. Jean Mayer of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, has noted that the typical McDonald’s meal — hamburger, french fries, and shake — not only contained little in the way of vitamins, but he also observed something dentists have discovered to their own expressed alarm: namely, that McDonald’s bland mushy food was so lacking in roughage that it did not require any teeth.
There has been even more serious criticism of the McDonald’s meal over its possible role in the coronary troubles that victimize Americans at an uncommonly early age. The contents characteristic of a McDonald’s meal — fat, carbohydrates, calories, and sodium — are also characteristic of food that raises the cholesterol count, which leads to heart disease. Long-range health problems are usually cited as a possible result of a regular intake of this type of diet. Dr. George Christakis, nutrition chief at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, estimates that one-third of the children raised on the all-American meal would be high-risk heart attack candidates by the time they reached fifty. His grim picture of the future forecasts a race of debilitated Americans — the “McDonald’s Generation” — who were fueled and bloated by a lifetime addiction to hamburgers, fries, and shakes.
Overall, what most impresses those who examine the McDonald’s diet is not the bundle of empty calories; rather it is the formidable array of machinery that’s been massed around it. For many years, a closely held string of research labs and equipment makers has supplied the company with a stream of continually updated gadgets to automate the serving and cooking of food to the ultimate degree. McDonald’s boasts a Brave New Kitchen that seems far removed from the lackluster trade of burger flippers and fry cooks; with winking lights to guide the grills and computer-run fryers that adjust to the moisture of every stick of potato; with instruments for testing the solidity of raw potatoes and the fluffiness of shakes; and with a host of measured scoops and dispensers that serve the cause of standardization, volume, and profit rather than that of providing a more wholesome meal.
Speed, rather than nutrition, is at the heart of hamburger science; in the very early days of McDonald’s, founder Ray Kroc a lotted fifty seconds to serve a hamburger, shake, and fries; and a milestone was achieved in 1959 when a record thirty-six hamburgers were served in 110 seconds. Since that eventful day, further breakthroughs have added to the propulsion; the cooking capacity of fryers has been constantly increased until it recently reached $230 worth of trench fries per hour, and in the company’s newly established, grandly named Department of Food Science and Technology, test runs have begun on a “direct draw shake machine” which is to replace the familiar high-speed multi-mixers and enable one counterman to draw directly four shakes of different flavors.
This sort of technology has been lavished to an unusual degree on Mac fries, making the pale golden sticks, basked in infrared lights, the most profitable item in the store, scoring an approximate 40 percent sales increase each year. An ingeniously devised wide-mouthed scoop eliminates even a few crumbs of waste, and as an instrument it was symbolic of the whole McDonald’s fast-food merchandizing approach: the scoop not only avoided costly spillage, but it actually gave the impression of abundance by making each bag appear to be overflowing with fries.
But as an example of technological food engineering nothing could beat the shake. Since there is barely a drop of milk in it, it is never called a milk shake, and in the Brave New Kitchen of McDonald’s this product was literally materialized out of thin air. It’s a cold chemical brew, a sweet. heavy froth averaging 317 calories.
The steady companion of the shake on McDonald’s American plan is Big Mac, 560 calories of blustering burger. When thawed from frozen dormancy, dressed and garnished with pickles, onion, and Secret Sauce it attains a formidable appearance. But most of this is due to a burgeoning bun (with high sugar content for faster browning) and a spare tire of “roll” in the middle. The premeasured sprinkling of onions is de-gassed for faster broiling.
Big Mac’s appearance hinted at a life of secret patty perversion, a burger boudoir filled with scents and cosmetics. It wore color to bring on a gleam. Texture to give it volume. Flavor to give it taste. The Big Mac lettuce was kept green with applications of sodium bisulfite, citric acid, ascorbic acid, calcium silicate, sodium citrate, and sodium hexametaphosphate. Its pickles were douched with polysorbate-80. Not surprisingly, when a few years ago a writer for Today’s Health set out to take a comparative sample of fast-burger brands, he gave Big Mac lowest marks in gustatory appeal, reporting that the “whole thing tasted like a charcoal-broiled roll garnished with day-old salad.”
The real secret of Big Mac’s bulk was something known in the fast-food trade as “fixin’s” — “filler” that ran from computer-counted splats of ketchup and mustard and burgeoning bun to massive advertising and a volume of packaging that completely overwhelmed the measly measure of meat with a cascade of Golden Arch paper cups, bags, boxes, sacks, napkins, straws, wrappers, balloons, and giveaways. Looking inside this mountain of patty paraphernalia, Consumer Report found in its recent study that the Big Mac meal not only contained less meat than other burger brands, but that altogether it provided less total food.
The issue of deceptive “bulk” and “food value” that riddled Big Mac was to take a quantum leap with McDonald’s introduction of the Quarter Pounder: the big burger that didn’t quite weigh up to its promise. The Quarter Pounder shared all the nutritional disqualifications of the other major members of the McDonald’s meal — the “overflowing” bags of trench fries, puffed-air shakes, and Big Mac “filler”; but on top of these it had political problems: last year the Quarter Pounder briefly stewed in Watergate, and it barely avoided being served on the Nixon impeachment menu.
The Quarter Pounder entered the world in the 1972 Nixon reelection year, and as the newest, the biggest, and heaviest addition to the all-American meal it was given the debut of a long-awaited super-weapon. It was paraded before the Investment Analysts Society of Chicago, at McDonald’s annual stockholders meeting, and at the Fourth International McDonald’s Convention for Operators held in Honolulu. It was billed as a “Meal on a Bun,” and accompanied by high sloganeering, such as “The sandwich where the meat really takes over”; “Man does not live by bread alone”; and “It won’t cost you a lot of bread to get a lot of meat.” The Quarter Pounder quickly proved to be the Big Bertha of the burger arsenal, booming away and rolling up earnings.
But the multimillion-dollar ad campaign that came wrapped around McDonald’s super-burger was challenged not long after its introduction by Benjamin Rosenthal, the volatile, bespectacled Democratic congressman from Queens, New York, who revealed the findings of a USDA-run series of tests showing that the Quarter Pounder weighed as much as a full ounce and a half less than its name implied. Rosenthal charged that McDonald’s replacement of its former Double Hamburger with the Quarter Pounder substituted a lower-value product at a comparatively higher price. This was just another way, Rosenthal said, in which McDonald’s helped cheapen the American food dollar.
Some time later Ray Kroc visited the White House and met with Nixon during a dinner for big campaign givers, and it wasn’t long before Kroc’s contribution — $250,000 — came under fire from various people, including Senator Harrison Williams of Naw Jersey and columnist Jack Anderson who linked Kroc’s huge donation to McDonald’s attempts to include a sub-minimum wage for teenagers in the minimum wage bill then being debated by Congress. The “youth differential.” as this provision was called, would have immensely benefitted McDonald’s, the largest employer of teenagers in the country.
Congressman Rosenthal, the determined foe of the Quarter Pounder, had another explanation for Kroc’s sudden political generosity; the Queens representative seized on a favorable ruling by Nixon’s Price Commission (then part of the “economic stabilization plan”) which in the fall of 1972 allowed McDonald’s to raise the price of its Quarter Pounder by four cents — a 9 percent increase that spelled millions of dollars in additional hamburger profits. Charging that McDonald’s had bought this plum with Kroc’s “massive campaign contribution,” Rosenthal ranked the Quarter Pounder with the Soviet wheat deal and the ITT affair as an example of the administration’s readiness to make special deals with big corporate election supporters.
The final word on the role of the Quarter Pounder in what has been described as the White House Horrors might well be in the still-guarded Nixon tapes. A commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle in 197 4 offered the possibility of an explosive hamburger conversation between President Nixon and Ray Kroc. “Once the House Judiciary Committee gets hold of the White House tapes … it’s all over,” wrote Washington columnist John D. Lofton. “The controversy involving John Dean and the million dollars in hush money will pale into insignificance when the committee chairman, Representative Peter Rodino, flips on the recorder, and the president says to Ray Kroc: ‘Raising the price of the Quarter Pounder Cheeseburger would be no problem.’”
The controversies embroiling the Quarter Pounder have made McDonald’s even more defensive about giving out nutritional information regarding its products. Some of this has been couched in hamburger mystification — the Secret Sauce, for instance, “the formula of which,” Time magazine wrote, “is guarded like an atomic secret.” McDonald’s has put a similar blanket of silence over the rest of the all-American meal, dismissing all nutrition queries politely on grounds of “competitive reasons” — as Family Health magazine learned a few months ago when it asked the company for a list of menu ingredients for a fast-food survey it was doing. McDonald’s outright refusal surprised the magazine. Family Health complained about people with milk allergies who eat at McDonald’s and asked angrily: “Are they not entitled to know whether the shake contains milk?”
But the questions have not gone away; and in the wake of its recent political turmoil, stirred by economic discontent. the country has been in a questioning mood — willing even to question the all-American itself. So, increasingly, Hamburger Central has had to withstand a barrage of criticism from food experts, dieticians, physicians, and consumer spokesmen who, in virtually all instances, have condemned the McDonald’s menu as a substandard meal, lacking in wholesomeness, nourishment, and food value.
McDonald’s usual defense of the deficiencies in its menu has been a sheepish argument that nobody eats a McDonald’s meal as a regular diet. But in recent years it has become very clear that for a lot of low-income and ghetto residents the McDonald’s menu often constitutes the main course of the day, so the company decided to do a nutritional study of its own. This project was so sensitive that it could not be entrusted to an independent research body, and the man chosen to undertake it turned out to be an old friend of Ray Kroc, a reliable hamburgerologist by the name of Ed Trazeman who had previously acquired a number of McDonald’s franchises in Wisconsin.
Trazeman had at one time been a director of research for Kratt in Chicago, and cushioned by a $300,000 McDonald’s grant he launched his patty project in association with WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which was best known for its invention of the deadly rat poison, Warfarian.
The results of the Trazeman Study differed little from the chief criticisms of nutritionists; the data was released without fan-fare and in the course of a brief advertising campaign that lasted for only the month of December 1973, McDonald’s grudgingly admitted in a Redbook magazine advertisement: “We’re not suggesting, of course, that a meal at McDonald’s gives you all the nutrients you need. You still need a balanced diet that includes a daily intake of fruits and vegetables for other vitamins and minerals.”
When the WARF Study findings did surface they did not result in an improved menu for the masses, but, rather, in a new McDonald’s ad campaign that skirted the issue. It featured Ronald McDonald, the company’s redheaded trademark clown, and a rock band — all dressed as vitamins and minerals — called Ronald and the Nutrients. They banged out a garbled message that young children ought to eat food from the basic nutrient groups every day — along, presumably, with their daily dose of hamburgers, fries and shakes.
At the same time, McDonald’s headquarters cautioned its far-flung corps of operators, franchisees, and managers not to draw attention to nutrition; it was wisely suggested that because of the sensitive nature of advertising nutritional values, local advertising should be limited to Ronald and the Nutrients.
Even today McDonald’s lovers seem to be one of those dirty secrets, sort of like MAGA voters. Empirical evidence would indicate that a lot more people fall into the category than will admit to it in normal conversation. Naturally, these days we would have something called foodindustry.com which presumably does all sorts of important things for the food industry (but probably nothing for MAGA, per se). According to this obviously accurate source, even 50 years later McDonald’s still has a massive lead in popularity over other convenience options. Hey, you can get better burgers out there, but you really can’t beat a Filet-O-Fish when the mood hits. … And we even say that using our outside voice.
