The Big Mac Turns 50: How a Burger Built on "Bigger Is Better" Rewrote the Rules of Fast Food

It set off fast food's supersize craze and became a symbol of American business — and, through its link to obesity, a social problem.

Few products carry as much fame and as much blame as the Big Mac. It is treated as a symbol of America, even as a piece of Western culture, and it is also accused of being the chief culprit behind human obesity.

In the 50 years since it appeared, the Big Mac has become one of the best-selling burgers on earth. Americans eat 550 million of them a year; worldwide sales run to about 1 billion. It is probably also the only fast-food product with a museum of its own.

Three slabs of bun, two beef patties, lettuce, pickles, onions and a special Thousand Island-style sauce — eating one today feels like nothing special, since you can buy it at any of McDonald's 30,000-plus restaurants around the world.

It is exactly that unmatched reach, plus a high degree of standardization, that led The Economist to devise the Big Mac index, a measure of how currencies are valued against the dollar. In English-speaking countries the index even produced a word, "Burgernomics." That is how a burger came to be tied to something as large as the world economy.

As McDonald's core product, the Big Mac is often treated as a synonym for McDonald's itself. It set off fast food's supersize craze and changed the rules of the whole industry; it became a symbol of American business; and, through its link to obesity, it became a social problem.

The Economist published the 33rd Big Mac index not long ago. The burger itself, though, no longer holds the pull it once did — younger eaters call it boring. Its staying power, and what it did to the way people eat, are still worth a look.

"The Big Mac came about because we needed a bigger sandwich."

The Big Mac was invented in 1967 by Jim Delligatti, a McDonald's franchisee, who died in 2016.

McDonald's was cool to the new burger at first; it was happy enough with cheeseburgers and fries. Before the Big Mac existed, standardized production and franchising had already carried the chain across the United States: in Ray Kroc's eighth year in charge it had sold 1 billion burgers, and by 1965 there were more than 700 McDonald's restaurants in the country.

Management also thought Delligatti's burger was priced too high at 45 cents. McDonald's mainstream burgers then cost 18 cents, and headquarters worried the price would scare customers off.

Delligatti pushed until headquarters let him test it. Before long his restaurants had the fattest gross margins of any McDonald's franchise.

In 1968 the Big Mac went on sale at McDonald's across the United States.

McDonald's pioneered a great deal in fast food, strict standardization above all. The Big Mac, however, was a follower's product.

"The Big Mac came about because we needed a bigger sandwich to compete with Burger King and the specialty shops," Ray Kroc wrote in his autobiography.

Who first noticed that bigger sandwiches sell better is no longer traceable. What is certain is that Burger King was among the first to act on it. In 1958 Burger King's Jim McLamore saw that rivals' large burgers were moving fast. He reworked the patty broiler, and the bigger — and slightly dearer, at 37 cents — Whopper was born. It pulled a nearly dead Burger King into rapid growth through the 1960s. For ten years the chain had almost no competition in large burgers. The Whopper was to Burger King what the Big Mac would be to McDonald's.

The Big Mac arrived a decade late, but McDonald's greater scale and a ferocious advertising blitz (we told that story in our report on the ad wars between Burger King and McDonald's) turned it into a hit fast. A year after launch it accounted for 19% of McDonald's total sales.

Bigger is better: how the Big Mac changed fast food's rules of the game

Because it carried an extra patty, an extra layer of bun and extra cheese, the Big Mac's early ads always carried a line like this: here is McDonald's new sandwich, made for the out-of-the-ordinary appetite.

The burger changed fast food's rules of the game. It opened the era in which more food — or more calories — was better. As the sociologist George Ritzer wrote in The McDonaldization of Society, McDonald's has always insisted that bigger is better, and many chains share that mentality.

In McDonald's early years its burgers, fries and Coke came in one size only. From the 1950s on, and especially after large burgers started selling, portions were graded. The original order of fries, about 250 calories, has since become fries in small, medium and large. In the 1950s McDonald's had a single beef patty weighing 1.6 ounces; today a patty that size is sold only in the children's Happy Meal.

David Satcher, a former US Surgeon General, said: "They have supersized everything. When you walk into a fast-food restaurant, the staff are trained to steer you toward the bigger sizes."

The appetite for bigger food arrived just as American society was changing. After the Second World War the US food industry grew fast, more women left home for paid work, household disposable income rose and the hours women spent on housework fell — all favorable ground for fast food.

A crop of chains — Pizza Hut, KFC, Domino's, Wendy's — were founded between the war and the 1970s. Selling larger portions at relatively low prices, so the food looked like better value, was not only fast food's edge over conventional restaurants; from the start it was also one of the main weapons the chains used against each other. At scale, adding food to a serving costs a company little at the margin — the customer pays 50 cents to go from medium fries to large — while the customer feels fuller and feels he got a bargain.

For a long stretch, people shopped for the most food at the lowest price, with no thought to how much they should be eating. Cheap value meals are still a standard tool for lifting revenue and taking market share.

Amy Bentley, a historian and professor of food studies at New York University, said: "After the war, people thought about food in terms of quantity over quality. A tall, sturdy body seemed to say: I don't do manual labor, I have plenty to eat."

Then came obesity, and the Big Mac took the blame

"What's the secret of the Big Mac's success? Lots of fat and salt!"

That is Andrew F. Smith, a food historian and the author of Hamburger: A Global History. Along with the burger's success came the obesity and health problems that trailed it.

Nutritionists have never stopped attacking McDonald's. "The typical McDonald's meal — hamburger, fries and a cold drink — gives you very little nutrition. This kind of diet clearly raises cholesterol and can end in heart disease," said the Harvard professor Dr. Jean Mayer.

In his documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. He gained 25 pounds, his cholesterol rose 65 points, and his body fat went from 11% to 18%. Doctors told him that staying on the diet would soon bring on coronary heart disease and cirrhosis. The film won the documentary directing award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and public health at New York University, argues that "the Big Mac's effect on Americans and on the world has been enormous — mostly on eating habits, and not all of it good. It became the benchmark and the model for junk food."

In 1977, only 6% of Americans' calories came from fast food. By 2010 the figure was 16%. The share of the population that was overweight or obese rose from 42% to 65%.

Laying all of that on the Big Mac is unfair, but as McDonald's signature product it has probably taken more fire than anything else.

Michael Delligatti, son of the inventor, thinks blaming American obesity on the burger is unjust. "The lobster bisque you order in a fancy restaurant has far more calories than a Big Mac," he said.

Worth noting, though: even as the health craze intensifies, bigger-and-more fast food appears to be back in fashion.

In China, McDonald's began pushing its "So Big" line in 2016. It became one of the chain's best sellers last year, and one of the few new lines McDonald's has landed successfully in the Chinese market, though the pulling power of Kris Wu's fans probably had a lot to do with it. Recently the line has spread from chicken cutlets and wings to milk tea, ice cream and soft drinks.

In the mature US market, the response was warm enough that McDonald's is rolling out $1, $2 and $3 menus nationwide this year. Its rivals — Taco Bell, Wendy's and Burger King — have all launched low-price deals of their own.

Why a burger became an index for measuring exchange rates

In 1971 McDonald's left North America and began expanding worldwide, starting in Japan. In 1990 it entered the former Soviet Union, and the same year opened in Shenzhen. Britain and France both became important markets (France was for a time the most profitable market outside the US). As the golden arches spread, customers eating standardized fries, Coke and burgers also absorbed an American culture of efficient, modern dining.

According to Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia, India's first McDonald's opened in New Delhi in 1996 and drew protests from Hindu leaders. A young Indian woman told The Christian Science Monitor: "I don't mind McDonald's serving beef in other countries. I came here just to experience the culture."

McDonald's is the most globalized fast-food brand. Ray Kroc once said: "I don't believe in market penetration in a single market. What we talk about and think about is the world market."

Today McDonald's has restaurants in nearly 120 countries and markets, and every one of them sells the Big Mac, or a local variant of it. The recipe is roughly the same everywhere, and local McDonald's distributors negotiate ingredient prices. Those two facts make the burger a decent yardstick for purchasing power parity (PPP).

The Economist is said to have first considered Coca-Cola as the basis for comparing currencies, then dropped it because Coke's price varies by channel within the same country — it costs more in a convenience store than in a supermarket. The Big Mac is sold only at McDonald's, at one price within a market, which makes comparison cleaner.

When The Economist launched the index in 1986, it meant it as a joke: a rough gauge of exchange rates and purchasing power parity. More than thirty years on, the magazine still updates it every year, and the index has found its way into more than twenty academic journals and studies.

The theory underneath is purchasing power parity, which holds that exchange rates adjust on their own until a basket of goods costs the same in different countries. In this case the basket holds one item.

Averaged across four US cities, a Big Mac now sells for $5.28. If a country's Big Mac converts to more than $5.28, its currency is expensive; if it converts to less, the currency is undervalued. In the eurozone, for example, the average price is €3.95, or $4.84 at current rates — meaning the euro is undervalued against the dollar by 8.4%.

The index has other uses. Jonathan Perraton, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Sheffield, says that when a company needs to compare the cost of business travel across countries, the Big Mac index is a reasonable way to judge exchange rates. "But if you want something more precise and more searching, the index has plenty of limits."

It ignores differences in labor costs between countries, for one. The Big Mac is a traded good; set against non-traded goods such as housing, it cannot accurately measure exchange rates or the gap between rich and developing countries.

Still, the Big Mac index invented the product index. Because it is easy to grasp and easy to pass along, other outlets and research bodies besides The Economist — Bloomberg Businessweek among them — have launched indexes of their own, built on the Starbucks tall latte, the iPhone, the iPod, IKEA's Billy bookcase, Coca-Cola. Every product that can name an index is made to one standard and sells everywhere, and the company behind it is a global giant.

And like the Big Mac index, most of them can hardly capture the whole picture — certainly not along a single dimension.

To younger eaters the Big Mac is a boring burger, and that is McDonald's problem

One hard fact: only one in five American millennials has ever tried McDonald's most famous food.

There are simply too many burgers to choose from now. Besides McDonald's old enemies Burger King and Wendy's, there are smaller chains that look more distinctive and more human than industrial McDonald's: In-N-Out Burger and Five Guys both do better with millennials, and the pricier Shake Shack grew fast enough to become the hottest name in the restaurant business.

In a 2014 Consumer Reports burger survey, the Big Mac finished last out of 21 burgers. That was the verdict of 32,000 American consumers.

To win back interest, McDonald's tested two new sizes in more than 130 restaurants and then, in the first quarter of 2017, rolled them out nationwide: the Mac Jr. and the Grand Mac.

That was close to the largest change McDonald's had made to the burger in its 50 years. "We want to give customers choices for different lifestyles, to meet their needs," the company said in a press release — meaning it wanted both the big eaters and the small ones.

The Grand Mac was reportedly meant to answer the giant burgers at Five Guys and Smashburger, while the Mac Jr. took account of Shake Shack, whose burgers are a little smaller; McDonald's also said the smaller one is easier to eat on the move.

According to the company's results, the prompt national rollout of the two new sizes, along with cheap drink promotions, helped comparable US sales grow 1.7% in the first quarter of 2017.

Abroad it has gone less well. When the Grand Mac reached Britain early this year, one taste test put it this way: "If you fancy a burger that is boring beyond belief, try McDonald's new Grand Mac."

The other big challenge began in 2011, when burgers cooked to order from fresh beef started catching on among American fast-food and fast-casual brands.

That trend is bad news for a company built on speed and standardization. Bringing fresh beef to more than 14,000 US restaurants means changing both the supply chain and the kitchen equipment, and it slows down how fast a restaurant can serve the burger.

Only last year did McDonald's announce that it would switch the Quarter Pounder from frozen beef to fresh this year. Since the tests began, some franchisees have voiced food-safety worries: "If we don't handle the meat right, bacteria could get into our product."

Americans, meanwhile, seem to prefer chicken. US Department of Agriculture figures show that in 2017 the average American ate 92 pounds of chicken and only 57 pounds of beef. McDonald's has even copied the chicken chain Chick-fil-A, selling a Southern-style chicken sandwich.

The Big Mac's predicament is McDonald's predicament.

And the McDonald's product people are talking about most right now turns out to be the Szechuan sauce that went viral thanks to the cartoon Rick and Morty.

Uncredited images are from Flickr, McDonald's Facebook page, sfgate and businessinsider