Name: The McDonald’s McPizza: A Huge Failure
Uploaded: 2024-06-13T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 6 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

From double quarter-pounders to double quarter-pounders with cheese, McDonald's menu is the stuff of legend.

And depending on where you are, it changes.

Adverbs of manner

If you're in Hawaii, you can order locally sourced Kona coffee, in Spain you can get a goat cheeseburger, and in Japan, you can get a matcha green tea McFlurry.

But if you're an eagle-eyed viewer, you might be noticing a delicious, cheesy, circle-shaped hole in their menu.

After all, McDonald's whole thing is serving easily reproducible, people-pleasing, and iconically American foods, and if there's one thing that checks all those boxes, plus the additional box of being pizza, it's pizza.

Well, it turns out that McDonald's did serve pizza for about 15 years, and it ended up being a massive, expensive failure.

McDonald's first introduced the McPizza in Kentucky and Indiana in 1989.

Riding high and looking to attract more dinnertime customers, C-suite officials saw expanding into the $21 billion pizza industry as a sure way to make more money.

McPizza was a long shot from the beginning, but it proved popular with its first two restaurants, so the company brought more pizza to more places.

The company also piloted several pasta dishes that would join the McPizza to create a new, exclusive dinner menu that didn't include burgers, and soon, you could buy pizzas in over 2,000 franchises across the US.

But trouble was a-brewing, and this time, it had nothing to do with repeated assassination attempts on Mayor McCheese.

The whole pizza thing was the result of a 15-year development plan which didn't consider what McDonald's restaurants were designed for.

See, most McDonald's kitchens look like this—a rectangle with fryers, assembly stations, warmers, grills, soda fountains, freezers, fridges, an oven, toasters, and touchscreen computers to take orders on.

For good old Mickey D's, this kitchen had been honed over 50 years to get hot food in your grubby little hands in a matter of minutes from ordering,

beginning with the very first McDonald's' own speedy system that guaranteed your order was ready as soon as you paid.

And today's system evolved from that first system—your order appears on a screen behind the counter, and gets printed on a sticker after you pay.

In a matter of minutes, an employee grabs a wrapper, a patty from a warming oven, a toasted bun from a conveyor belt toaster, and condiments, and puts your burger together.

If you happen to order fries, they'll be salted and packaged in less than a minute, and the result of this intricate process will be delivered to you in five to ten minutes—faster than you can say, wait, what is grimace even supposed to be, as long as you say that really, really slowly.

But the problem with this assembly line system is that it's meant to accommodate a relatively limited number of very fast-to-prepare foods, essentially all of which are either fried or cooked on a griddle.

Pizza, on the other hand, typically takes longer to cook, and must be cooked in an oven.

And even though McDonald's replaced their ovens in preparation for McPizzas, they didn't quite work out.

The company had created a powerful convection oven meant to take pizzas from frozen to fresh in under six minutes, but the pizzas didn't cook that fast.

After they'd expanded McPizzas to hundreds of franchises, McPizzas were taking 11 to 16 minutes to cook, and when people ordered multiple pizzas, it could take 20 or 30 minutes, which flew in the face of McDonald's' entire business model.

So all this chaos begs the question of how grab-and-go pizza places, like Little Caesars, operate.

Well, the key with Little Caesars is that their kitchen operates around making as many pizzas as fast as they can, constantly.

Most hours of the day, you can walk into a Little Caesars and buy up a warm, freshest pizza without ordering in advance, for less money than it costs some brave soul to knock $15 billion off Eli Lilly's market cap.

This setup reflects a constant cycle of pizza-making, which allows the store to serve pepperoni and cheese pizzas throughout the day, which means no calling ahead or waiting on a pizza to be baked.

In fact, Little Caesars' industrial setup parallels the McDonald's model of having an assembly-line food ready to be cooked in minutes, only it's pretty much based around one food.

The dough's ready to go, and putting on the toppings and sauce takes less than a minute, with most pizzas ready in 10 minutes or less cooked in one of the kitchen's vast number of ovens.

And Little Caesars also has warming ovens that keep both hot-and-ready and advance orders simultaneously hot, and additionally, also, ready.

So when Mickey D's couldn't deliver pizzas faster than Pizza Hut or Domino's, which just so happened to be the crux of McPizza's marketing plan, there was no reason for customers to get their pizzas from a beef-peddling clown, and so began the beginning of the end.

As it turns out, the pizza boxes were too big to fit through restaurants' drive-thru windows, so every franchise with pizza in a drive-thru had to get their windows expanded to be pizza-friendly.

That's not a joke—they had to spend millions to make all the food delivery holes in their walls bigger for their new food to fit through.

And even though the quality of pizza was surprisingly high for a company known for mass-producing beef and buns, the wait times just didn't ease up, even with the window expansions and the convection ovens.

By 2000, McDonald's gave up and discontinued McPizza altogether, though one franchise owner kept it going at locations in Pomeroy, Ohio and Spencer, West Virginia until 2017, when corporate killed the McPizza for good.

But as of today, you can still order McPizza at the 18,000-square-foot or 1,700-square-meter McDonald's in Orlando, Florida,

which obviously has the space and resources to make them for the Disney World tourists willing to pay out of the nose for anything with a logo on it.

In all this is to say, Little Caesar, despite his slight stature and his having been assassinated in 44 BCE, is not a man to be trifled with.

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