Who Makes McDonald's Beef Patties?

Be it a classic Big Mac or a hearty Quarter Pounder, the core ingredient that these McDonald's burgers can't do without are the ground beef patties. Some of you fast food fans out there might have wondered how McDonald's patties came to be while chomping down on that burger. Well, there aren't dedicated burger-shapers pressing fresh patties from a bucket of ground beef working behind the counter at each McDonald's. To streamline the operation, McDonald's buys all of its ingredients — from the beef patties in the burgers to the coffee it brews — from external vendors.

These vendors will handle everything from sourcing the beef from local farms to shaping and flash-freezing the patties for transport (there are videos documenting the mesmerizing process). Then, these packaged patties are shipped to McDonald's locations nationwide to fill your Big Macs and Double Cheeseburgers. The only notable exception is the Quarter Pounder: The patties for this particular burger are cooked on the spot when you order in most U.S. states. This beef, though, will still come from a supplier. Fortunately, McDonald's is quite open about its suppliers. According to its website, all the beef patties used in the U.S. come from a company called Lopez Foods.

According to McDonald's, Lopez Foods has been the company's main beef supplier for over three decades. Based in Oklahoma City, this company describes itself as a "protein-processing" specialist on its website. It's just another way of saying they handle all kinds of meat products. Besides supplying McDonald's with "fresh and frozen ground beef," they also supply pork and poultry products, just not for McDonald's — the fast food giant's pork and poultry are handled by different companies.

All the beef provided is USDA-inspected and the company regularly undergoes third-party audits from organizations like the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. So, if you're worried about animal welfare, then it does seem like McDonald's and their suppliers aren't cutting corners there. Lopez Foods (or Lopez-Dorada Foods, to use its full name) is also part of the Global Food Safety Initiative, so the beef is checked to see if it's fit for consumption before it becomes a delicious McDonald's burger.

For a time, there was a bizarre rumor floating around online that McDonald's burger patties are made by a company called "100% Beef Company." That way, McDonald's could use it as a legal loophole to market its patties as "100% Beef," all while filling them with unsavory things like worm meat to cut costs. Consumers would be none the wiser while corporate execs giggle evilly in the boardroom from the millions in savings they made from their devious scheme. There are versions of this story in other places, like Australia, where the company's supposedly named "100% Australian Beef Company."

Well... none of that is true. As you've just learned, the patty suppliers who work with McDonald's aren't called "100% Beef Company" or anything of the sort. Not to mention that such an underhanded trick would obviously land McDonald's bosses in hot water with regulators. It was an obvious hoax, but people believed it. The story became so widespread at one point that McDonald's had to write an entire blog post to reassure people about what its burgers are made of. "Here are the facts: All of our burger patties in the U.S. are always made with 100% USDA-inspected beef," the post read. "That's the only ingredient: 100% real beef."