With big changes coming to McDonald's, will quality or quantity win out?
In 1987, McDonald's introduced "Super Size" portions for the fast food chain's menu items, which was essentially tantamount to an extra large size. However, in the thick of the diet culture-obsessed early aughts, and just two months before Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary Super Size Me was released, the company announced that it would be phasing out the option.
According to an industry insider and former McDonald's corporate chef, however, Super Size could be poised for a comeback a full 20 years later.
On his popular TikTok account where he spills trade secrets, Chef Mike Haracz recently divulged how McDonald's executives have been teasing bigger portions and bigger burgers, which leads him to believe that the company is going to revisit Super Sized items. "For those of you who are a little on the younger side, McDonald's used to have a size larger than large called Super Size," he quipped.
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♬ original sound - Chef Mike Haracz
While he noted that there were "a lot of holes" in Spurlock's movie and how his study was conducted (the film gained no small amount of criticism from the scientific community), it certainly played a big role in forcing McDonald's to remove the option from its menu. However, Haracz notes that given the value-conscious times we currently live in, consumers might see things differently now.
"But now, the consumers who want value, the consumers who have been complaining about 'shrinkification' or 'shrink-flation' want more, want bigger, want more value," he continued. "And a perfect way to do that, which would also break the internet, because Super Size hasn't been a thing for awhile, would be for McDonald's to announce Super Size coming back."
Haracz concluded the video by positing the question of whether that's something that would necessarily appeal to McDonald's faithful, or if people would rather see the return of appropriately priced regular sizes and Dollar Menu items.
As Haracz notes, this is just a theory for now. The chain has not made any announcements about the return of Super Size.
Amid rising inflation, however, McDonald's has indeed been called out for gradually phasing out Dollar Menu items. As of last year, even soft drinks or a small French fry exceeded one dollar at many locations. With big changes reportedly coming to McDonald's, it will be interesting to see how the company manages to straddle the line of competing with fast casual chains like Shake Shack and Five Guys while also appealing to more budget-conscious customers.
