Sex, Bombs and Burgers (10 page)

From Lab to Drive-Thru

Wartime processing advances were only half the food revolution story, though. The second part wasn’t taking place in home kitchens and grocery stores, but in restaurants around America. Just as the accelerating pace of post-war life was creating demand for domestic foods that were faster to prepare and easier to store, the same was happening outside the home. Before the war, eating at a restaurant was a rarity for the typical family, but the economic boom led to a wave of new restaurants focused on getting people their meals quickly, cheaply and efficiently. And technological engineering was at their core.

The first fast-food chain to achieve international success, Dairy Queen, was centred on an invention that solved the two biggest problems of the ice cream business: the hardness of the product and the time-consuming manual labour that went into scooping it. The new machine stored ice cream at temperatures just above freezing, so it was cold but soft, and dispensed it with the simple opening of a spigot. This allowed Dairy Queen outlets to pump out hundreds of cones an hour, vastly increasing their volume of business.

Burger King was also founded on a similar volume-enabling machine. The restaurant’s contraption cooked four hundred burgers an hour by automatically moving them through a broiler in wire baskets, which was significantly faster than cooking them manually. Kentucky Fried Chicken, meanwhile, used a new type of pressurized deep fryer to cook drumsticks and breasts in one-third the time of conventional deep fryers. Now titans of
the industry, all of these chains relied on technology to mass-produce food, achieve ever-increasing sales volumes and drive large-scale expansion.

Of course, none were as successful as McDonald’s. In the fast-food industry’s early days, no other chain saw as much potential for technology, science and engineering to deliver sales speed and volume, and no one profited as much from investing in innovation. The original McDonald’s was started by Richard “Dick” McDonald and his older brother Maurice “Mac,” the sons of a shoe factory foreman in New Hampshire. The brothers had moved to California at the height of the Depression in 1930 in search of riches. After trying their hands at managing a movie theatre, they opened a drive-in hot dog stand in Pasadena in 1937. The stand was a success but the brothers wanted a higher volume of customers, so they relocated to the nearby boom town of San Bernardino, where they opened the first McDonald’s drive-in restaurant in 1940 on busy Route 66. It too was a hit, particularly with teenagers, who used the drive-in as a hangout. By the mid-forties McDonald’s, like many of the dozens of other drive-ins dotting California, was raking it in. Together the brothers had created a new style of restaurant, one that was driven by the post-war economic boom, the growing ubiquity of automobiles and an increasing desire for speedy service.

But the operation still wasn’t fast enough or achieving the sort of volumes the McDonalds wanted. They were frustrated with the traditional tools and systems of the restaurant business and wanted to apply the assembly-line technology that Henry Ford had used to speed up car manufacturing. The brothers invented their own equipment and “became enamoured of any technical improvement that could speed up the work,” as one
McDonald’s historian put it.
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In the fall of 1948 they closed down the restaurant to refit it purely for speed. They replaced the grill with two bigger custom-built versions and hired a craftsman to design new equipment, much of which is still used in the fast-food business today, such as the broader metal spatulas that allowed for several burgers to be flipped at once, and the handheld stainless steel pump dispensers that squeeze precise amounts of ketchup and mustard onto buns. The McDonalds also purchased four Multimixers, each of which made five milkshakes at a time. The move turned out to be fateful, as it eventually brought them into contact with Ray Kroc.

Besides the gear, the brothers also made major changes to their system. The menu was pared down to just eleven items, and all china and flatware was scrapped in favour of paper bags, wrappers and cups. The carhops, who had served customers at their cars, were fired; customers now had to walk up to the window to place their order. Jobs were regimented into simple tasks, so that two employees were responsible for making milkshakes while another two did nothing but cook fries. The new-and-improved McDonald’s, featuring the “Speedee Service System” complete with a sign depicting the cartoon chef “Speedee,” re-opened in December as a finely tuned machine, the perfect blend of human and technological efficiency. Sales took a hit initially as the teenagers were scared away, but they soon rebounded and surpassed previous volumes as families discovered the new McDonald’s.

By 1954 the brothers were swimming in money and had sold a handful of franchises before their fateful meeting with Kroc. The fifty-three-year-old Chicago native had been a lifelong entrepreneur who had done moderately well, first by selling
paper cups and then milkshake machines. His largest customers were using no more than two Multimixers, so he was intrigued by the tiny California operation that had four going at any given time. He travelled to San Bernardino to meet the McDonalds and was awestruck at the lunchtime crowd. Ever the entrepreneur, he knew he had to get on board.

Kroc struck a deal with the brothers for national rights to their restaurant and kicked McDonald’s franchising—and its use of technology to build volume—into high gear. Kroc enlisted Jim Schindler to help design his own test franchise in Des Moines, Illinois, near Kroc’s Chicago home base. Schindler had trained in electronics in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War and designed tools for munitions manufacturing, but his most important skills, as far as Kroc was concerned, came from his experience in designing kitchens for submarines. Besides accounting for the cramped environment, submarine kitchens needed to be rugged, easy to clean and standardized, so that one design could be plugged into a variety of ships. Kroc had the same need for his planned high-volume kitchens, so Schindler, who designed much of the plug-and-play stainless steel equipment found in the growing chain’s restaurants, was the perfect fit.

As Kroc’s franchising juggernaut gained steam—over four hundred restaurants by 1963—so too did its quality-control problems. McDonald’s quickly found it difficult to serve burgers and fries that tasted the same in Los Angeles as they did in New York, and year-round to boot. Kroc turned to the same kind of food science being employed by big processors such as Hormel, Carnation and Nestlé, and in 1957 McDonald’s became the first fast-food company to open a research lab. One of the lab’s first tasks was perfecting the french fry. Converting
to Simplot’s frozen potatoes was only one step in the quest. The McScientists also experimented with curing potatoes so that their sugars were converted into starches, and studied the spuds’ solids content with new, complex machinery. They found that only potatoes with a solids content of at least 21 percent were acceptable, so they equipped suppliers with hydrometers, devices that measured a potato’s gravity and thus its solids content. Few potato farmers had ever seen a hydrometer before, let alone used one, but if they wanted to supply the growing food giant, they had to incorporate the new technology. McDonald’s even invented the “potato computer,” which was really just a sensor that detected when the oil in the fryer hit the correct temperature. The sensor, which beeped when the fries were perfectly cooked, was later used with all fried products, including Chicken McNuggets and Filet-o-Fish, and is now standard across the industry. McDonald’s quest for the perfect french fry, an endeavour that cost the company an estimated $3 million in its first decade, was not unlike unlocking the secrets of the atom.
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The company put the same amount of scientific and engineering effort into ensuring the quality and uniformity of its other food offerings. To speed up milkshake production and save space in restaurants, Kroc introduced a new machine that mixed a concentrated liquid mix rather than a frozen ice milk base. The liquid mix was poured into the machine, frozen and automatically dispensed, much like Dairy Queen’s soft-serve ice cream. The new system was faster than the old, which required making milkshakes manually, and the cans the liquid mix came in—similar to concentrated orange juice cans—took up less storage space than the frozen ice milk.

Before McDonald’s, hamburger was the meat industry’s poor cousin, a veritable repository of meat packers’ unwanted parts. That didn’t suit Kroc, who not only wanted reliability from his burgers, but also preferred to avoid the sort of large-scale lawsuits that would follow if he served people mystery meat. So the company’s labs dissected and experimented on ground beef as if it were an alien from another planet. The result was a fifty-item checklist that was passed on to franchisees, who could then test the meat they received from suppliers to see if any shortcuts had been taken.

By the late sixties, McDonald’s restaurants received hamburger shipments three times a week from a variety of the company’s 175 suppliers. With that much movement coming from so many sources, it would have been easy for some shipments to be overlooked for inspection or for some suppliers to cut corners, a fact that deeply frightened Ray Kroc. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night from dreaming that we had bad beef and thousands of customers with upset stomachs. I wondered how the hell we’d get over something like that.”
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The solution was to shift the chain’s focus on technological innovation from the store level up to the supplier level. In the late sixties, a trio of small meat suppliers formed a small company called Equity Meat with the goal of solving McDonald’s beef problem. They came up with a process that was similar to freezing fries—the beef patties were flash frozen cryogenically to below two hundred degrees, which sealed in their juices. The group experimented with different coolants, freezing speeds, meat-grinding techniques and cooking times, and even came up with the first computerized system for ensuring that the right blend of meat went into the burger. While McDonald’s
executives scoffed at using frozen patties initially, much as they had with frozen fries, after testing they found that the burgers tasted just as good if not better than fresh ones, and shrank less when cooked on the grill.

All of a sudden, the company’s quality-control problems with meat were solved. By 1973, just two years after testing Equity’s burgers, almost every McDonald’s restaurant had converted to frozen patties. As per its agreement with McDonald’s, Philadelphia-based Equity was required to share its technology with any other supplier the chain saw fit. Four other meat packers were chosen and in one fell swoop McDonald’s pared its beef suppliers down from 175 to 5, creating huge efficiencies by consolidating its quality-control management to only a few points. The company was thoroughly grateful to Equity and gave it a good chunk of its burger business, rapidly transforming the small company, now known as Keystone Foods, into one of the biggest beef suppliers in the world. Today, Keystone employs more than 13,000 people and services 30,000 restaurants worldwide, handling 388 million pounds of beef and 1.6 billion pounds of poultry products a year.
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The other beef suppliers who got Equity’s technology, including Golden State and Otto & Sons, also became industry giants in their own right.

McDonald’s ushered in a similar transformation of the chicken business. In the late seventies, after realizing there was growing customer demand for poultry, the company hired Rene Arend, an acclaimed chef from Luxembourg, to come up with a chicken product. Arend actually happened upon the chicken McNugget by accident. His Onion Nuggets, which were battered and deep-fried chunks of onion, failed to catch on, but McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner suggested he try the
idea out with chicken. Arend cut some chicken into bite-size pieces, then battered and fried them up. Turner loved them, but both he and Arend knew that mass-processing chicken in the numbers McDonald’s needed was difficult because there was no automated way of removing the bones. KFC might have been selling chicken by the bucket-load, but the rival fast-food chain wasn’t chopping its poultry up into the little bits required by McDonald’s, which meant the burger chain would have to innovate once more.

Keystone again came to the rescue by modifying a hamburger patty machine so that it cut deboned chicken into the now-familiar McNugget shapes. The poultry still had to be deboned by hand, but the invention greatly sped up production lines. Chicken McNuggets entered test stores in 1980 and were an immediate hit, rolling out company-wide a year later. Keystone shared its technology again, this time with Tyson Foods, which was already one of the largest chicken producers in the world.

Tyson introduced its own improvement to the McNugget process by creating an entirely new breed of chicken. “Mr. McDonald,” as the breed was dubbed, was nearly twice as large as traditional broiler chickens; its size didn’t just mean more meat, it also made the deboning process much easier. Within three years of their introduction McNuggets accounted for 7.5 percent of McDonald’s U.S. sales, and they brought in more than $700 million in 1985, making them one of the most successful products in the company’s industry.
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McDonald’s is now the second-largest purchaser of chicken in the world, after KFC.

The poultry industry jumped on the bandwagon and reaped the benefits. The McNugget contract helped Tyson surpass rival
ConAgra as the largest U.S. chicken producer in 1986. Deboned chicken, once the ugly duckling of the poultry business, took off and others piled on. KFC jumped on board with its own nuggets a few years after McDonald’s. Tyson rivals, meanwhile, responded to this shift in the market by growing their own bigger chickens, a trend that continues to this day as suppliers try to get more bang for their buck with ever-larger birds. As Bud Sweeney, one of the developers responsible for coming up with McDonald’s deboning process, put it back in the eighties: “We absolutely revolutionized the chicken business.”
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The trend has angered animal rights activists, though, who are horrified by images of the bloated chickens, unable to support their own weight.