12 Facts Only Super Fans Would Know About McDonald's Big Mac

Since its introduction in the 1960s, the Big Mac has become McDonald's signature offering in the minds of many of the restaurant chain's fans. It hits all the notes a McDonald's meal is supposed to. Besides being fast and convenient, it's flavorful, filling, and consistent -– you can always count on your next Big Mac to taste just as good as the last. But while nutritionists decry the Big Mac as a symbol of American excess (and warn that you may need three days to fully digest one), for McDonald's, it is serious business –- the chain estimates it sells about 550 million of the hearty double-decker burgers in the U.S. each year.

But when Pennsylvania McDonald's franchise owner Jim Delligatti first proposed the idea of the Big Mac, inspired by a two-patty burger already popular at competing chain Bob's Big Boy, corporate management had serious reservations. The new giant sandwich would cost twice as much as a classic cheeseburger -– a whopping 45 cents, which McDonald's senior managers feared would be a deal-breaker for customers. They finally agreed to let Delligatti test out his invention at one of his stores, and within months, that store's revenue had increased more than 12%. This got top management's attention and set the stage for a national rollout of the Big Mac –- and its eventual growth into a fast food icon.

The Big Mac's biggest selling point has always been its heft. Early ads called it "a meal disguised as a sandwich" and urged diners to "open wide and say Ahhhh!" And its very name, of course, distinguishes it as the option of choice for hearty eaters.

But while the Big Mac's generous size set it apart when it launched, it's far from the biggest burger McDonald's has ever offered. To keep the attention of restless customers, the chain has experimented with even bigger offerings. To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Big Mac in 2017, for instance, McDonald's introduced the Grand Mac, a truly impressive limited-time offering consisting of four patties and extra toppings, sauce, and cheese. And in Portugal and Canada last year, McDonald's began testing an even bigger burger, the Big Arch, which features two patties, cheese, crispy toppings, and special sauce. While the Big Arch contains only two patties and two buns (no middle bun), it's a more substantive sandwich than even the Grand Mac –- the Big Arch weighs in at an impressive 14 ounces, in contrast to the 11.4 ounces for the Grand Mac and 7.6 ounces for a Big Mac.

Restaurants often tweak their menus to suit the tastes of their customers, and McDonald's is no exception. In the 1960s, Big Mac inventor Jim Delligatti had managed to secure control of all McDonald's franchises in the Pittsburgh area, but he still faced a major challenge. While he had a lot of stores, they weren't getting as much traffic as he'd like. Something had to change.

He began to brainstorm ideas for new menu offerings to draw more diners in, and he noticed something interesting –- in one of his restaurants, many of the customers were steelworkers dropping in at the end of their shifts. And after a hard day of physical labor, they were seriously hungry. (This is no exaggeration — the average steelworker weighing 180 pounds would burn about 650 calories per hour, while the same person doing data entry for an hour would burn only about 120 calories.) Delligatti realized that regular burgers just weren't cutting it with this crowd, so he set out to create a bigger and more satisfying meal for them. So for those who criticize Big Macs as decadent calorie bombs –- yes, they totally are, and it's entirely intentional.

If the Big Mac has a single defining feature –- besides its size -– it's probably the creamy, tangy special sauce. Like the Big Mac itself, it was the brainchild of McDonald's franchisee Jim Delligatti, who created it specifically for his new sandwich. The craveable condiment has inspired a slew of copycat recipes (like this one paired with a deluxe cheeseburger bowl you can make at home). A former McDonald's corporate chef came clean on social media with what he claims is the definitive recipe –- a quick mixture of mayonnaise, sweet pickle relish, mustard, vinegar, and spices, including paprika and garlic. (Unlike Thousand Island dressing and Russian dressing, which are themselves different but are often confused with the special sauce, the McDonald's version contains no ketchup.)

But the legendary sauce wasn't always the same as the version we now know and love. And it wasn't even called special sauce originally. In early ads for the Big Mac, it was referred to as secret sauce, but for unknown reasons, it was changed to special sauce in a 1974 ad campaign, and the name stuck. The sauce too evolved over time. When the Big Mac first launched nationally, McDonald's field-tested two versions of the sauce. Both were equally popular with diners, so McDonald's split the difference and combined the recipes to create a singular flavor. The chain tweaked the sauce recipe in 1991 but by 2004 it had returned to the original flavor that we still see today.

The Big Mac's name seems so appropriate and intuitive that it's easy to imagine its inventor gazing at his first prototype of the giant burger as the words Big Mac popped into his head. But in reality, McDonald's initially struggled to come up with a name for the novel burger. The restaurant wanted a name that would signal that this was a serious burger for adult appetites, not standard kid food. They proposed two possible names, both of which were pretty cringey: the Aristocrat and the Blue Ribbon Burger.

It was a 21-year-old secretary in the McDonald's advertising department, Esther Glickstein Rose, who suggested the name Big Mac. As is often the case when a junior employee proposes an idea to senior executives, her colleagues initially laughed it off. But somehow, the idea persisted –- and became one of the restaurant's defining product names. Despite the impact of her idea, Rose had to fight for years to get McDonald's to acknowledge her contribution –- not even her own children believed she came up with the name. In 1985, the company finally awarded her a plaque and a note of appreciation for her game-changing idea. The plaque, of course, featured an image of a Big Mac.

Many of us have a go-to menu item at our favorite fast-food place -– whenever we go, we know exactly what we're going to order. Wisconsin resident Don Gorske is one of these super-consistent diners: His regular McDonald's order is a Big Mac and has been since he tasted his first one in 1972. To say he enjoyed it would be an understatement: He ate nine Big Macs that day.

But if you think that experience would have ruined Big Macs for him, you'd be wrong. He's eaten them every day from that moment on, and as of September 2024, he'd eaten over 34,600 Big Macs, cementing his longtime position in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who's eaten the largest number of Big Macs in their lifetime. His unusual obsession, which includes keeping every container and every receipt, has led to numerous TV appearances along with occasional gigs as a McDonald's brand ambassador. And despite Big Macs comprising around 90% of his diet by his own estimation, his cholesterol levels are enviably low.

Longtime McDonald's fans have seen the restaurant chain evolve over the years. Diners have watched as new menu items get added (see which McDonald's burger ranked the best in a Chowhound taste test), and some discontinued menu items we're not getting back. Still, there are familiar items that get an occasional refresh –- old-timers wax nostalgic about the days when McDonald's apple pies were fried rather than baked and the restaurant cooked its fries in beef tallow rather than vegetable oil. Both of these changes were motivated by health and nutritional concerns. Indeed, fat and calories have become more of a concern for diners in recent years, and when looking for a quick meal, many opt for chains with more healthful options.

And the iconic Big Mac has gotten caught in the crossfire of this trend. While it remains McDonald's flagship offering in the minds of many diners, it's not as popular as it used to be. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that only one in five millennials had even tasted one. To revive interest in the Big Mac, McDonald's has experimented with both smaller and bigger versions of the burger.

Many loyalists love the Big Mac for three main reasons: It's filling, it's flavorful, and it's cheap. Indeed, the entire McDonald's brand was built on the promise of consistent quality at an affordable price. So when a traveler posted an image on X in 2023 that showed a Connecticut McDonald's was charging nearly $18 for a Big Mac, fries, and a drink, the internet exploded in outrage.

While this pricing was far from typical for McDonald's, the post hit a nerve with consumers exhausted by post-pandemic price gouging. It forced McDonald's into damage control mode, with McDonald's U.S. president Joe Erlinger reassuring the public in multiple news reports that the average price of a Big Mac combo meal was only $9.29 across the country. Erlinger acknowledged that its overall menu prices had increased by 40% between 2019 and 2024 to cover the rising costs of labor, food, and overhead, but he added the restaurant was working to develop more affordable meal deals for frugal diners.

McDonald's has become a global symbol of American influence -– it has restaurants in over 100 countries around the world, and diners from Israel to Brazil to Australia can walk into their local McDonald's and order a Big Mac. But what they get will be a bit different from the Big Macs we get here in the United States -– in some cases, quite different.

Local religious customs, for instance, can dictate what goes into a region's Big Mac. If you order a Big Mac in Israel, it will come without cheese out of respect for kosher dietary laws that forbid the consumption of meat and dairy together in the same meal. And in India, you'll get a Chicken Maharaja Mac, which contains two layers of chicken rather than beef, since the Hindu faith considers cattle sacred (and thus off-limits as food). But even in countries that use more or less the same ingredients as the U.S., you'll notice subtle differences. The patties in Argentine Big Macs are grilled over coals rather than on a flattop grill, making them ever so slightly less fattening. And if you order a Big Mac in Egypt, be sure to do so on an empty stomach –- Big Macs there are 10% heavier than those in the U.S.

Businesses with new products to sell all have one goal: to educate prospective customers about what that product is and why they need it in their lives. When McDonald's unrolled its national launch of the Big Mac, it took a straightforward approach to the customer education part. Its early print ads simply listed the burger's components: two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame-seed bun.

This appealing list of ingredients alone was probably enough to sell the sandwich to hungry burger lovers, but in 1974, the creative director of McDonald's advertising agency decided to take it a step further and set the list to music. The resulting jingle became an unshakable earworm, its profile boosted even further by a promotion offering a free Big Mac to anyone who could sing it in under 4 seconds. And while the original ad with the jingle only ran for a year and a half, McDonald's has rebooted the jingle several times over the years, ensuring its staying power.

When McDonald's franchisee Jim Delligatti developed the Big Mac, one of many obstacles he faced was to find appropriate buns. McDonald's management had grudgingly allowed him to test out a prototype of his new burger at one of his restaurants on the condition that he use only ingredients the chain already provided. For Delligatti, however, this stipulation was a nonstarter –- his new burger was too big to fit into standard McDonald's buns. Instead, he sourced bigger, sesame-studded buns from a local bakery.

The choice of Big Mac buns continues to be a serious matter for McDonald's –- after all, the bun is what holds the whole thing together. But it's more than just structural scaffolding; it has to taste good, too. So in 2023, to make Big Macs both tastier and more stable, McDonald's switched out its old Big Mac buns for sesame-topped brioche buns. The upgraded buns are not only fluffier, but thicker on the bottom, which reduces the chance of burgers falling apart mid-meal. (If you're making your own burgers at home, see which brands have the best and worst hamburger buns to buy at the store). 

The Big Mac may be a quintessentially American invention, but like McDonald's itself, it has gained fans around the world. The company's most recent figures for investors reported that at the end of 2023, it had 41,822 restaurants in 115 countries, and Big Macs (or local variations of them) appear on menus in countries ranging from India to Argentina.

In the 1950s you could buy McDonald's entire menu for under $2. Prices have gone up a lot since then. But the chain's iconic menu items has become a barometer of sorts for finance types. Because of the Big Mac's global ubiquity, economists have adopted it as an informal benchmark to assess the valuation of different currencies. The so-called Big Mac Index starts with the assumption that Big Macs are worth the same around the world: For example, if a Big Mac in the U.S. costs $5 and a Big Mac in Beijing costs 20 yuan, the correct exchange rate should be 4 yuan to the dollar. Official exchange rates, however, often differ –- in 2024, for instance, the rate was 6.4 yuan per dollar. This suggests the yuan has been undervalued relative to the dollar. Of course, other factors, such as local labor and food costs, can make the Big Mac an imperfect metric for purchasing parity –- but the Big Mac Index still appears in economics textbooks as an easy way to illustrate the principle.

Inventors don't always get the credit they deserve. While almost everyone knows Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and Henry Ford developed the Model T (and the modern automotive assembly line), we go through our lives using any number of other useful products without giving a thought to the creative person who first envisioned them.

The family of Big Mac inventor Jim Delligatti, however, weren't about to let his name or his story be forgotten. In 2007, on the 40^th anniversary of the launch of the Big Mac, they opened the Big Mac Museum inside a McDonald's in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles from the restaurant where the Big Mac first launched. (Channeling their patriarch's business savvy, they chose the location because of its heavy foot traffic.) At the museum, its memorabilia includes a vintage sauce gun and bun toaster as well as a giant Big Mac statue. And if all this makes you hungry, you can also get your usual order of a Big Mac and fries –- the location is still a working restaurant.