The Major Difference Between McDonald’s And Wendy’s Beef
To an impartial observer, the only real difference between McDonald’s and Wendy’s may seem cosmetic. After all, every fast food chain is a bona fide giant of the quick-service world, hurling an assortment of cheeseburgers and fries at hungry customers (and vastly outshining the absolute worst American burger chain in the process). Still, even the casual fast food consumer knows that there’s more to distinguish these two than a red-haired girl with pigtails and a pair of golden arches—like the kind of beef Wendy’s uses compared to what’s cooked at McDonald’s restaurants.
It’s no secret that Wendy’s uses fresh, never frozen beef in every one of its North American restaurants; This fact has been openly touted by the organization founded by Dave Thomas since the first store opened in Columbus, Ohio in 1969. Even after more than half a century of near-exponential growth, Wendy’s continues to grow from the iconic Dave’s Single to Jr. It has never wavered in its commitment to offering burgers made with never-frozen beef across all menu items, right down to the Bacon Cheeseburger.
By contrast, while McDonald’s boasts on its signs that it serves billions of customers, it never became a fast food juggernaut thanks to its unrefrigerated beef. The home of Ronald McDonald (because a clown lives everywhere, right?) almost exclusively uses frozen beef patties in its burgers, but a notable exception on the McDonald’s menu uses fresh beef.
Read more: Ultimate Ranking of McDonald’s Food Products
McDonald’s only uses fresh beef for a single menu item
Quarter pounder with cheese in a box on a McDonald’s table – ZikG/Shutterstock
If we were writing this article before 2018, we might not need to go into further detail about the huge difference between beef at McDonald’s and beef at Wendy’s. Before that year, all of the burgers on the menu were prepared from frozen beef. However, aiming to retain customers in the long term while increasing the reputation of its food among the public, McDonald’s chose to start using fresh beef with Cheese (or Without Cheese) in its Quarter Pounder in 2018.
Of course, despite the uproar surrounding Quarter Pounder’s switch to fresh beef, the chain didn’t follow Wendy’s lead and became an exclusively never-frozen beef operation. As of this writing, Mickey D’s still favors flash-frozen patties on all its other burgers and doesn’t seem inclined to make any larger operational changes to beef anytime soon.
Still, Wendy’s isn’t alone in the fast food world in prioritizing fresh ingredients. Many other popular fast food chains also use fresh ingredients instead of frozen, so there’s no shortage of options for fresh fast food enthusiasts other than Wendy’s (or the Quarter Pounder from McDonald’s).
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