McDonald’s was primarily been known as a burger business. At least, in the decades after visionary Ray Kroc partnered with the McDonald brothers’ burger stand (which, believe it or not, first started as a barbecue joint) in San Bernardino, California, in 1955 and convinced them to let him franchise the restaurant. But Mickey D’s burger-and-fries reputation belies a surprising truth: It was the Chicken McNugget, not the burger, that actually saved McDonald’s from potential demise in 1983.
In the late 1970s, just as the restaurant seemed to have hit its heyday, there was bad news for the burger biz: Beef and pork, which the American Heart Association said were laden with cholesterol and saturated fat, were labeled the primary causes of heart disease. Cardiovascular disease had been at epidemic proportions for a couple of decades. In 1977, the U.S. government issued a report called “Dietary goals for the United States,” a report based on the findings of a committee on nutrition headed by Senator George McGovern. The report listed as one of its goals that Americans should eat less animal fat, specifically beef and pork, and replace it with poultry and fish.
That seemed like a potential death knell for a fast-food chain that had built its success on ground beef. People seemed to be turning away from the beef that had been McDonald’s specialty and instead favoring chicken products. As fears about beef and its dangerous effects increased among the public, sales at the 6,000 McDonald’s restaurants began to decline. If the company was going to stay relevant, it would have to adjust to the times.
How McNuggets were born
Chicken McNuggets got their start thanks to Luxembourgish chef René Arend. Arend had been the executive chef for the company for several years and had tried fruitlessly to get a chicken product on the menu. He switched gears at Ray Kroc’s behest and began developing a deep-fried onion nugget. But in 1979, the chairman of McDonald’s board of directors suggested using chicken instead. According to TIME magazine, the chicken nugget was, at that point, a recent innovation that had been publicized in 1963 by Cornell University food scientist Robert Baker. The McDonald’s executive chef chopped some chicken into bite-sized pieces, tossed it in batter, and deep-fried it, and the result was an instant hit.
Eventually, McDonald’s chicken nuggets fans know, the recipe changed to minced rather than chopped chicken, and the nuggets became standardized in size and shape. Their now-iconic McNugget batter was created with the help of Gorton’s Seafood, which had already assisted the company in the creation of the Filet-O-Fish. After that, all that remained was for the chef to settle on the dipping sauces to serve with the nuggets: the original four were Honey, Sweet and Sour, Hot Mustard, and Barbecue.
Initial blind taste tests confirmed that McDonald’s had a winner on its hands. By 1983, they were added to menus throughout the U.S., in six-, nine- and 20-piece servings. The next year, McNuggets were rolled out to golden arches around the world. Though the recipe has been adjusted a few times in the last couple of decades and now contains no artificial preservatives, colors, or flavors, they are still enormously popular, ranking in the top five of our favorite fast-food nuggets. Today, McDonald’s is the second-biggest retailer of chicken in the world.
