The Filet-O-Fish, the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin were not devised by McDonald's management, but by franchisees, independent operators bound to the brand by contract. Ronald McDonald the clown also first appeared, in 1963, in advertisements commissioned by a franchisee. The dates and figures in these accounts, however, vary from one source to another.
The Filet-O-Fish, an answer to meatless Fridays
Lou Groen opened a McDonald's in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1959. His customers included many Catholics, whom the Church at the time required to abstain from meat on Fridays: during Lent, they went elsewhere to eat. Groen developed a breaded fish sandwich, originally made with halibut, before the switch to Alaska pollock, according to the National Catholic Register.
Ray Kroc, the company's founding figure, was reluctant and proposed his own meatless option, the “Hula Burger”: a slice of grilled pineapple and cheese in a bun. The two sandwiches went on sale on the same day, Good Friday 1962 according to Crux and Business Insider. The score reported by several sources: 350 Filet-O-Fish against 6 Hula Burgers.
What happened next differs: Crux writes that the sandwich was extended to the whole network as early as 1963, while Business Insider mentions a limited roll-out that year and then a permanent addition two years later. The initial price is given as 25 cents by one and 29 cents by the other. Groen, who died in 2011 aged 93, operated up to 42 or 43 restaurants, depending on the source. None of the sources consulted reports any remuneration linked to the invention.
The Big Mac, tested in Uniontown
Jim Delligatti opened his first McDonald's in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in 1957. Convinced that his customers wanted a more substantial sandwich, he at first came up against refusals from head office: he told Reuters in 2007 that it had taken him two years to convince McDonald's. According to History.com, the company finally allowed him to experiment, on condition that he used only the ingredients already in stock.
The Big Mac went on sale in 1967 at his restaurant in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, priced at 45 cents, and joined the national menu in 1968. A 1993 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, quoted by Patch, however places its creation in the kitchen of his first restaurant, in Ross Township. Ray Kroc acknowledged this authorship in his autobiography.
“The Big Mac was born of our need for a bigger sandwich to compete with Burger King and various preparations from speciality shops. [...] The idea came from Jim Delligatti, in Pittsburgh.”Ray Kroc, autobiography Grinding It Out, quoted by History.com - translated from English
According to the AP, McDonald's said that Delligatti had received neither payment nor royalties for his idea. He summed it up to the Post-Gazette: “All I got was a plaque.” In 1979 he co-founded the Ronald McDonald House of Pittsburgh and in 2007, with his family, opened a Big Mac museum in North Huntingdon. He died in November 2016, aged 98.
The Egg McMuffin, or the invention of breakfast
Herb Peterson came from advertising: a vice-president of the D'Arcy Advertising agency in Chicago, he wrote McDonald's first national slogan, according to the AP. Having become a franchisee in the Santa Barbara area of California, he set out to turn eggs Benedict into a sandwich that could be eaten by hand, and had a Teflon-coated ring made to give the egg its round shape, a job entrusted to a blacksmith according to his son. According to the Santa Barbara Independent, Ray Kroc came to taste this off-menu product and approved it.
The dates vary: 1971 for the tasting according to the Santa Barbara Independent, 1972 for its creation according to the AP, 1975 according to Nation's Restaurant News. Which restaurant served it first is disputed between Santa Barbara and Goleta. McDonald's added a full breakfast range to its national menu in 1977. Peterson died in March 2008 aged 89; he was still operating six restaurants.
Ronald McDonald, a clown who came from a local advertisement
In the early 1960s, the McDonald's franchisee in Washington sponsored a children's programme, Bozo's Circus, in which Bozo the clown was played by Willard Scott, later the weather presenter on NBC's Today programme. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, when the station dropped the programme in 1963, the franchisee produced his own advertisements with a new clown, Ronald McDonald, played by Scott; never before had a McDonald's franchisee single-handedly designed its own television advertisements.
Scott claimed to have invented the character; others attribute it to the franchisee Oscar Goldstein and his agency. According to Reuters, head office liked the clown so much that it took him up nationally, with another performer. The Boston Globe, citing the book McDonald's: Behind the Arches, reports that the agency considered Scott too heavily built for the role. He died on 4 September 2021, aged 87.
Happy Meal and Ronald McDonald House: shared origins
The Happy Meal, launched nationwide in 1979, has several claimed fathers. In Guatemala, Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño, whose husband had opened the country's first McDonald's in 1974, created a “Menú Ronald” for children (in 1977 according to Mental Floss, in 1978 according to Prensa Libre), which she said she had presented to the company. In the United States, the idea is also attributed to Dick Brams, McDonald's regional advertising manager in St Louis, and to the advertising executive Bob Bernstein. No version commands a consensus.
The first Ronald McDonald House, opened in Philadelphia in 1974 to house the families of children in hospital, grew out of an idea by the paediatric oncologist Audrey Evans, with financial support from the Eagles, the city's American football team, and from McDonald's. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Eagles' general manager had persuaded local McDonald's franchisees to let part of the profits from the Shamrock Shake fund the purchase of the house.
In these accounts, adding a product to the menu required the approval of management, which then extended the ideas it adopted to the whole network. The know-how that the franchisor passes on to its franchisees was thus fed, for several of its best-known products, by inventions that came from the restaurants themselves. The sources consulted describe no mechanism for remunerating their creators.