The Confusing History Behind McDonald's Happy Meal

McDonald's may not be the original fast food restaurant (that honor goes to White Castle), but it is one of the biggest. There are more than 41,000 McDonald's locations across the globe as of 2023. And a lot of McDonald's success comes thanks to the food sold to children via the company's Happy Meals. Because of this, you'd think there would be a detailed history of how this kid's meal in the iconic red cardboard box with the golden arches came to be. Instead, its origins are so murky and tangled, the McDonald's corporate website skips over the birth of this important product that launched nationally in 1979.

What we do know is that there are three claimants to the invention of the Happy Meal. The earliest version of a McDonald's kid's meal came from Guatemala. Back in 1977, Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño, the president of McDonald's Guatemala until her death in 2021, came up with the idea of a kid's meal for the country's first McDonald's. She called it Ronald's Menu and it came with a hamburger, small fries, a soda, and a sundae. She also gave out a toy with the meal. Later that year, Cofiño presented her idea at a corporate McDonald's event in Chicago. But here is where the Happy Meal's history gets complicated.

Back in 1973, another fast food chain, Burger Chef, began offering a kid's meal with a toy inside. Dick Brams, a McDonald's advertising manager from St. Louis, pitched a similar idea to Bob Bernstein, an advertising executive from an ad firm in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1977 — the same year Cofiño presented her version. But Bernstein alleges he'd first come up with the idea on his own back in 1975 after seeing his young son perusing the back of a cereal box one morning.

After his death in 1988, McDonald's dubbed Brams "the father of the Happy Meal," a title that Bernstein took umbrage with. "Dick did a lot, but after the Happy Meal had already been created," Bernstein told the Chicago Tribune in 2019. Whoever the true inventor of the Happy Meal may be — and perhaps all three people deserve the credit — it was the toy inside that made the meal, thanks to collaborations with companies like Mattel and various movie franchises. The fast food giant sells an estimated 3.2 million Happy Meals a day, according to 2017 data from Sense360 (via Forbes). This kid's meal also led to McDonald's becoming the largest toy distributor in the world.