McDonald's Coke and World's Famous Fries
When I’m not feeling my best, I usually have two vices that help me feel just a little, and that is French Fries and a Coke, and sadly there is no better Coke (besides in a green glass bottle) than the Coke that McDonald’s serves. This isn’t just a mind game, there is actually a reason why most people stated that McDonald’s Coca-Cola is better tasting.
It is the one thing that McDonald’s still strives to make sure it is the best Coke around. It has to do with how they store their syrup and how they mix it.
It starts with their syrup. The syrup is the flavoring that is mixed with water to make your drink. Most restaurants get their syrup delivered in plastic bags, housed in a cardboard box, but McDonald’s gets their syrup delivered in a stainless steel tank. And these tanks help to keep the syrup fresh, by protecting it from light, temperature, air, and anything else that might take away from its delicious flavor.
The reason for this is a very special arrangement between McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, which started in 1955. Ray Kroc, was the man that made McDonald’s what it is today (he bought it from Richard and Maurice McDonald McDonald in 1955).
Besides the syrup being the freshest, McDonald’s has a very expensive top-of-the-line water filtration system that feeds the soda fountains. Another thing that McDonald’s does better, is they chill the syrup tanks, so the Coke is cold from the start, unlike most restaurants, that use a flash chill system that makes the drink cold in the lines inside the soda fountain machine.
McDonald’s even accounts for the melting of ice, making sure that the syrup-to-water ratio accounts for melting ice. McDonald’s also chills their CO2 tanks so you get a slightly higher level of carbon dioxide in the drink, which gives it a very crisp and bubbly level of carbonation and gives the McDonald’s Coke a little more bite.
When I started this post I said that my other vice is french fries, and I have to say that growing up, I always loved McDonald’s french fries, that is until someone had to climb up on their high horse and ruin it for the rest of the world. McDonald’s was known to have the “World’s, Famous Fries”.
The original french fries that McDonald’s made were fried in beef fat, which was originally used to cut costs, but accidentally resulted in some of the best french fries in the world. They had a mixture of 7% vegetable oil and 93% beef tallow. The world loved french fries until 1990 when they announced that they would replace the beef tallow with 100 percent vegetable oil. This change cost McDonald’s big, as they lost customers and nearly 10% in the stock. So why did McDonald’s do it?
It started in 1966 actually, when a business mogul named Phil Sokolof had a heart attack at the age of 43. After his recovery, he founded the National Heart Savers Association to campaign against cholesterol and fat and his top target was McDonald’s french fries.
Between 1966 and 1990, Sokolof spent upwards of $15 million on his crusade against McDonald’s. McDonald’s finally gave into Sokolof’s pressure and changed how they fried their french fries, switching to 100% vegetable oil (a mix of canola, corn, and soybean).
Let’s all thank Mr. Sokolof for destroying something that everyone loved.
