McDonald's Ambition and Anxiety Are Hidden in 50-Plus Years of Packaging Redesigns | QDaily Business History

What its packaging looks like tells you what its strategy is — and how the business is doing.

In 1961, six years after it was founded, McDonald's finally had colors of its own: red and yellow.

That same year, the color company Pantone picked out the shades that ruled the street: vermilion orange, bright pink, grass green, lemon chrome, cyan blue, bright purple. They turned up everywhere, on posters and peace signs, on miniskirts and buses. McDonald's red and yellow belonged to the same family of loud, bright color.

Take that year as the starting point and, 55 years later, on January 7, 2016, McDonald's looks nothing like that fierce, certain thing. From January on you will see seven colors — red, golden yellow, purple, orange, pale blue, bright green and rose pink — making up the company's new packaging, Dynamic Design. It is young enough. It also looks a little unsure of itself.

Dynamic Design packaging

McDonald's numbers have not been good these past two years either. Growth stalled completely in the first quarter of fiscal 2014, and by the third quarter of that year profit had fallen 30%. The only good news came in the earnings report last October, when McDonald's finally ended seven straight quarters of falling same-store sales in the US. This is the first crisis the company has faced since 2009.

The new packaging was born into that. Last Thursday, Matt Biespiel, McDonald's senior director of global brand development, unveiled Dynamic Design. Starting this January, McDonald's restaurants across the US will be the first to use it — takeout bags, drink cups and burger boxes — and it will then reach stores in a string of other countries. China is on the list, though the date has not been fixed.

"We want the new packaging to catch people's attention and make them feel that choosing McDonald's is a good idea," Biespiel said. You can hear how much the company is hoping for, and the hoping is one way of holding off its own anxiety.

This is the 10th large-scale packaging overhaul in McDonald's history, and every one of them has been tied to something: bad results, a shift in the culture, a public-relations crisis. Food packaging always plays that part. It is the front-line spokesman for a company's strategy, and now and then it is what makes the company, or breaks it.

In 1961 McDonald's drew the golden M for the first time, and it became the company's most enduring logo. In 1983 it brought in foam containers, then dropped them a few years later over the environment. In 2003, chasing young customers, pictures of young people appeared on the packaging for the first time. In 2008, with health on everyone's mind, McDonald's put fruit and vegetables on its bags.

Let's go through it in order:

From the Early Logo, Speedee, to the Classic Golden Arches

In 1955, when McDonald's put out its first packaging design, its logo and mascot were not today's M-shaped Golden Arches and Ronald McDonald. They were a fellow called Speedee.

Speedee packaging

Speedee wore a tall chef's hat, had a face made out of a hamburger bun, and stood with his legs apart as if running. The sign in his hand carried the company's slogan at the time — "Custom Built Hamburgers."

What Speedee really stood for was the "Speedee Service System," created in 1948, when the restaurant was still in the hands of its predecessors, Dick and Mac McDonald. That was also what a fast-food restaurant was at the start: getting food ready as fast as possible for people to carry away.

This red-and-blue mascot stayed on the packaging until 1961. That year the first version of the Golden Arches appeared. The idea came from the restaurant design that the architect Stanley Clark Meston and his assistant Charles Fish drew up for McDonald's: two neon tubes, 7.6 meters high, standing in the shape of an M. After that a golden-yellow M showed up on McDonald's bags, with an arrow running through the middle to mean "speed."

The first version of the "Golden Arches"

By 1968, after several rounds of revision, the Golden Arches were settled, with the word "McDonald's" set into the logo. Shortly before that, the new mascot Ronald McDonald had replaced Speedee, to avoid a clash with Speedy, the mascot of Alka-Seltzer, Bayer's effervescent tablet brand.

From then on this logo never missed a redesign. It became the most classic thing McDonald's has.

From a Foam Box Under Attack to a Window for Green Messaging

Before the 1970s a McDonald's burger came wrapped in a single sheet of wax paper; after that came cardboard boxes. The boxes we see today still work that way, but between 1983 and 1990 there was an interlude: as the menu grew quickly, McDonald's introduced a run of foam containers.

The box made for the McDLT was the strangest of them. The McDLT, now counted among the ten biggest flops in McDonald's history, sold itself on splitting the burger in two: cold, crisp lettuce and tomato on one side, a patty straight off the grill on the other. So the foam box was split in two as well. McDonald's had switched from cardboard to foam to keep food hot and fresh, but the McDLT was killed off before long, and the trouble with the foam box was bigger still.

Foam boxes McDonald's once used

The box made for the McDLT

In 1987, Clifford Raber, then McDonald's head of global public affairs, wrote to Robert T. Stafford, the Republican senator from Vermont, to say that McDonald's would stop using foam boxes made with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Six months earlier Stafford had cited scientific work showing that CFCs would do serious damage to the atmosphere, which left McDonald's with a sizeable public-relations crisis.

More than 48 million people around the world eat at McDonald's every day, and the packaging thrown away in a single day comes to more than 90,000 tons. At that scale the company is hard to miss. So after the crisis McDonald's began to speak carefully and thoroughly about the environment. In 1993 a recycling symbol appeared on the new packaging, and it has stayed there ever since. Last year the company also promised publicly that by 2020 it would use only recyclable, sustainable materials such as wood pulp.

Marketing That Keeps Playing Catch-Up

In 2003, Heye & Partner, an agency under DDB Germany, gave McDonald's the marketing idea "I'm lovin' it," now regarded as the most successful global campaign the company has run. Its product packaging was an important part of that campaign.

Instead of the Golden Arches standing alone, portraits of young people appeared for the first time on takeout bags and burger boxes. Their way of living filled out what the packaging said, while the packaging itself pointed straight at the customers McDonald's wanted. There was more than a little marketing in that.

McDonald's packaging in 2003, part of the "I'm lovin' it" campaign

In 2008 the American financial crisis did not give McDonald's much trouble. But a bigger problem was coming: young people cared about health, they were moving onto their phones, and they were redefining what counted as fashionable faster and faster. Almost none of this was within McDonald's experience.

In the 2008 redesign, pictures of fruit and vegetables appeared on McDonald's takeout bags for the first time, and the point was not subtle: McDonald's wanted to look "healthy." In fact, between 1998 and 2009 the number of times The New York Times used the word "obese" tripled, and mentions of "diabetes," which the paper first printed in 1970, rose tenfold. Sales of carbonated drinks began to drop steeply in 2004, and people were getting used to calling fast food junk food outright.

In 2008, fruit and vegetables appeared on the packaging

Along with the health trend came the shift to mobile. So the 2013 redesign put a QR code on the bag. Customers only had to scan it to get links to nutritional information, the McDonald's app and more.

The QR code arrives too (you may find it ugly)

Which brings us to this redesign. With "less is more" the fashionable design creed of the moment, McDonald's has finally put some thought into color.

According to an earlier survey by Color Communications, people tend to form an impression of a brand within 90 seconds, and 62% to 90% of that impression comes from color.

You can see that from 2003 onward McDonald's has been on the back foot. The culture was changing too fast. The pursuit of health hit the fast-food culture McDonald's itself had built. Young people chasing a "cool" image dropped an aging McDonald's. And as phones spread, McDonald's was still looking for a way to keep up.

McDonald's is not the only company with this problem. The whole fast-food industry has it: Pizza Hut hit its own crisis last June, with nine straight quarters of declining results.

While fast food as a whole sank, a new kind of restaurant called fast-casual rose quietly. Like fast food it cares about speed, but it also cares about how the store looks and how healthy the ingredients are. These, now, are where the restaurant business is heading.

Shake Shack, the burger chain that started in New York, is now valued at $1.27 billion, twice what it was worth when it went public last February. By the third quarter of 2015 its revenue and profit had risen for four straight quarters, up more than 60% and 90% year on year.

Its success comes from a better burger — better ingredients and sauces mixed with care — and from attention to the experience of buying one. Shake Shack has done a lot to make queuing comfortable, including cameras to watch the line and a buzzer handed over after you order that tells you when to collect your food at the kitchen.

Just as important, Shake Shack's packaging looks clean and plain: white as the main color, the Neutra typeface, and a flat burger built out of simple geometric shapes. A visual system that looks uncomplicated turns out to suit modern taste very well.

Shake Shack packaging

Can you really say McDonald's feels nothing about this competitor? It may never admit as much to reporters, but the packaging has already said it all.

Cover image from businessinsider, mashable, phaidon, wizardshark, ateriet, creativity-online