Why Is the McRib Only Offered Occasionally and Why so Randomly?

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later as slaves were brought in from caribbean plantations the food genre we know as barbecue developed in fact the word barbecue is a loanword from the taino language of the caribbean it was originally called barbacoa it is unclear whether the name comes from the native islander's method of cutting the meat or the wooden frame on which the food was smoked in any case after it arrived in the north american colonies it spread wherever pork was plentiful important here to the story of the magrib is that barbecue in the proper sense is any meat that is slow cooked over indirect heat usually wood and not merely meat with barbecue sauce on it it can take up to 18 hours to turn raw meat into barbecue for it to reach perfection if brined first it can take an additional day that is part of what makes the macrib a surprise rib joints usually slow cook many places brine it before smoking additionally cooking with wood fire is inherently messy barbecue meat is also often hand butchered none of this lends itself to a fast food chain that in 2011 had to abandon the idea of using celery root in one of its food items because to offer the item mcdonald's would have to buy all of the world's celery root supply and there would still not have been enough celery to meet the projected demand a frequent problem for the restaurant chain that annually serves 1 27th of all restaurant food consumed in the world and caters to about one percent of the world's population on any given day this brings us to the mcrib a confluence of several people's work and an accident of history to it it exists because mcdonald's underestimated the demand for chicken mcnuggets and needed an additional item to offer to balance things out a bit the goal of a restaurant like mcdonald's when adding a menu item is either to bring in new customers that would not have eaten at a mcdonald's or to get existing customers to choose a higher margin item than they would have otherwise ordered to do this mcdonald's will test and then roll out new foods when a menu item is successful like a big mac or chicken mcnuggets mcdonald's needs a steady stream of ingredients to support the demand it must also be at a price that leaves them a large enough margin to justify the work involved enter the chicken mcnugget which was a hit but they couldn't source enough chicken to meet demand this was to the extent that new patrons were lost because they were turned away when they didn't want to burger mcdonald's was facing an opportunity cost here it needed to find an alternative dish that this new group liked or loved as well to solve this they turned to their new chief executive renee arend rener end was from luxembourg but he trained as a chef in france graduating first in his class from college technique hotelier de strasbourg he was already a noted chef before joining mcdonald's he had cooked in the world's luxury hotels in europe in the united states serving movie stars such as cary grant or heads of state such as queen elizabeth in addition to the mcgrub he also helped introduce the chicken mcnugget breakfast biscuits salads and the chicken sandwich he joined mcdonald's because ray kroc was a patron at the restaurant he worked at and croc pursued him until he left haute cuisine to join the business and improve the offerings in attempting to replace southern barbecue he had to make it difficult to prepare food and generate something that would be similar enough to attract that crowd but without all of the time-consuming issues although nobody at mcdonald's will talk about how he solved the problems some things can be observed to unravel the mystery first traditional southern barbecue is messy it wouldn't take too many children or teens eating traditional barbecue to make cleaning a frequent chore at the restaurant the problem of course appears to have been solved by the bun a little mess might sneak out but no more than one would get from spilling ketchup from the sign of a burger this also helps to ensure that the food item like so many others at the chain can be eaten while on the go the next problem to solve is how to take the one to two day task of preparing the food that a rib jack might use and make it nearly instantly ready this appears to be solved by making it something a little different specifically observe that the magrib is closer to sausage in concept than a rib cheferend was from luxembourg which was once part of the german confederation and the holy roman empire before that sausages are a staple in germany and german cooking indeed in addition to the traditional hot dog bratwurst and nackwurst well known in the americas german cuisine includes over two dozen other types of sausage the magrib isn't a sausage but isn't that far from one in concept sausages are a cured food made of a mixture of ground meat and spices combined with preservatives they also tend to be slightly irregular in shape the general description used is not as a sausage but as a restructured meat product while that sounds dreadfully industrial it comes from work by the us army and its need to feed hundreds of thousands in some cases millions of soldiers every day the original process was developed at what is now called the u.s army natick soldiers system center in natick massachusetts natick's army labs are responsible for creating the military's food clothing shelters air airdrop systems and soldier support systems the army had already solved the problem of mass producing a uniformly shaped shelf-stable meat product that process was adapted by dr roger mandigo a meat scientist working for the army for mcdonald's the result is a mixture of pork shoulder and parts that might otherwise be discarded such as pig hearts salt is used to extract the proteins and that process allows the meat to be reshaped into anything no meat from the ribs is used although the magrib has 70 listed ingredients the process of taking fresh pork and turning it into a mcrib patty takes about 45 minutes processing plants butcher the hogs the meters chopped up seasoned and then transformed into the shape of ribs it is then flash frozen to keep it safe a one to two day process is turned into a less than one hour process when cooking at the restaurant is included add in chef renee secret barbecue sauce and you have a pork sandwich unlike any other nonetheless many dishes could be on the mcdonald's menus that are not such as this cargo it doesn't just have to taste good it has to accomplish mcdonald's corporate goals in his most recent annual report to his shareholders mcdonald's states that its goals are too retain existing customers regain customers that visit less often than they used to and to convert casual customers to committed customers this report says it does so by competing on the basis of price convenience service experience menu variety and product quality those disclosures provide us with the next clue as to why the magrib appears and then disappears in the american market but is a constant staple in for example the german market economists classify markets in a variety of ways one of those is by measuring how much power a firm has or at least potentially has over the price of the goods it sells to use the phrasing of warren buffett all firms would like to put a moat around their value creation process so that nobody can plunder their customers pirates don't just sail on ships they also live throughout the corporate world mcdonald's leading role in the restaurant industry is secure only to the extent that it can continue to out-compete its peers who often are capable of being much more nimble given that they don't have the supply chain problems a bear moth like mcdonald's has so mcdonald's is never secure unless it makes itself so when mcdonald's entered the chicken fast food market in 1979 with the chicken mcnugget there was little competition although the food had been developed during the 1950s and was similar to a schnitzel it changed that market when mcdonald's added it now chicken tenders and various forms of chicken nuggets are not only sold in a huge percentage of restaurants but they can be purchased at the grocery store to retain value mcdonald's usually engages in the form of competition that economists call monopolistic competition the term was coined in 1933 by the economist edward chamberlain his book was published at about the same time a book describing the same phenomenon was published by joan robinson both books study the idea of firms working in markets with imperfect competition the two extremes in economics are firms that are in perfect competition and at the opposite end when only one firm produces a good firms like mcdonald's sit in that precarious middle ground firms that find themselves in markets with perfect competition compete only on price they cannot do things to keep new firms out of their markets customers are willing to walk away at any time suppose that for some reason customers are suddenly willing to pay more in that case excess profits are made only so long as nobody notices that they could fill the gap by entering into competition with existing firms generally the business world is so competitive that such opportunities to earn excess profits are grabbed quickly because of this firm's imperfect competition markets often attempt to create value added opportunities to escape downright cutthroat competition for example dairy farms produce an entirely uniform set of products such as whole milk skim milk and so forth milk from one farm will more or less taste like milk from another farm with the caveat that diet can affect the taste but in practice price alone tends to determine which milk is bored some dairy farmers escape this trap by turning their milk into ice cream for the local market farm fresh homemade preservative-free ice cream as long as other local farmers do not enter that market that farmer will have a monopoly on farm fresh homemade ice cream but not on ice cream itself that creates a situation where a farmer is able to charge a premium for ice cream that by nature of being local typically will also contain fewer costly chemicals than competitors and cutting out just as costly long-distance shipping while mcdonald's would love to become a monopolist it is probably impossible to count the number of restaurants in the world that sell hamburgers mcdonald's could could beat on price but it would have to sacrifice any excess profits that it could earn if it did thus like the local dairy farmer making ice cream and selling it and a local ice cream stand mcdonald's wants to add value to the customer's experience of their mcdonald's burger mcdonald's would be a fool to compete on price alone and if anything has been shown mcdonald's management is not made up of fools instead mcdonald's creates innovations to give its patrons things that other firms can't or in some cases simply don't for example mcdonald's is the largest toy distributor in the world outstripping hasbro and metal it distributes over 1.5 billion toys per year with a happy meal starting the world's population young on getting accustomed to eating a mcdonald's for example in 1997 macdonald sold 100 million happy meals in one week when they introduced the teeny beanie baby mcdonald's wants you to want to pay it more money than you would for a generic offering and they use every trick in the book to accomplish this indeed the maghrib has a cult-like following is a clue why it appears and disappears there used to be a web tracker of mcdonald's restaurants offering them a grib so that mcgrib aficionados could travel to find the sandwich when not locally available this allowed families a way to plan a family trip to find and eat mcribs even if quite a distance away all producers want that type of fierce loyalty to their products but here's the thing the mcgrub was first introduced in 1981 and 1982. it had been test marketed in the midwest and was a hit however as it rolled out nationally sales were unspectacular and disappointing in general most people would expect that a product with disappointing sales would never be seen again but that ignores a monopolist's goal to sell something that nobody else has instead of looking at the sandwiches of failure it may have been that the marketing was a failure after all the magrib wasn't really built to explode onto the market but to fill the void created by inadequate chicken supplies and cater to the same customer so they had an alternative in 1985 it was taken off the menu but it reappeared again in 1989 this time with a new marketing campaign it would appear and disappear roughly annually each time with a new way to market it every time it reintroduced the macrib mcdonald's management learned new things about the patrons that liked and eventually loved their sandwich and so it was that mcdonald's next move was to expand its market by creative product placement in the summer of 1994 the flintstones movie came out based on the beloved television cartoon the movie gave mcdonald's a way to get the magrib in front of a new generation of possible future customers by the time the movie came out two generations had watched the flintstones either when it first aired or in syndication when the flintstones first came out there were only three television networks the internet did not exist yet there was nothing similar to a streaming service it meant that things that happened on television were a nationally shared experience the flintstones the brainchild of william hannah and joseph barbera was not a kids show it was a show made for adults and a parody of the television of the day no animated show was watched more until the simpsons came out in the credits for the original series the flintstones family goes to a drive-in theater during the opening credits after fred gets off work drive-ins now almost extinct all over the u.s in the early 1960s the family goes to a small drive-in restaurant that sells brontosaurus burgers and ribs in the ending credits ordering the ribs the family waits with the small tray attached to their car they have brought an order of bronto ribs that is larger than the vehicle the waitress setting the ribs on the tiny tray ultimately causes the car to tip over and the show closes until next week mcdonald's teamed up with the movie and turned mcdonald's into rock mcdonald's it brought back the magrib and temporarily offered the grand pooh bar meal it sold flintstones toys and glass mugs once the promotion ended mcdonald's went back to offering it intermediately and regionally until 2005. still it had introduced the meal to kids in november 2005 mcdonald's announced that it would no longer be carrying the mcgrib and started the macrib farewell tour mcdonald's created a petition to save the mcgrib under an assumed name as boneless pig farmers association of america the farewell tour was so successful that mcdonald's decided to cancel the sandwich again in 2006 and have a second farewell tour its success led to a third and finally a fourth farewell tour after which it was returned to regional menus for intermittent release the magrib was reintroduced nationally in 2010 but only for six weeks beginning with the legends of the magrip campaign since then the maghrib has continued with the limited reintroductions what appears to be scheduled amounts of time in specific markets it arrives with fanfare and is suddenly gone again everyone that wants a magrib knows that the clock is ticking on when they can get one so what is mcdonald's doing well it's controlling its profit equation psychologists have studied reward schedules and random rewards produce higher response rates steady stable rewards deliver lower rates for example hourly pay results in less work than commissioned income especially if commissions arrive at uneven points in time by artificially restricting the supply and making location and timing uncertain mcdonald's is priming the pump to get more people in its doors on the other side of the equation mcdonald's has been noted as releasing the magrib when pork prices are near their bottom it is important to remember that when mcdonald's decides to sell a pork item nationally it may be buying up pretty much all the pork available and it doesn't want to drive up the cost of its breakfast items like the sausage mcmuffin the magrib is no longer needed as an emergency substitute for chicken mcdonald's chicken supplies are now ample and stable but the mcgrib still plays a role in bringing in their patrons and their families that will come for the sandwich and nothing else the amount of time it remains on the market is likely dependent on how much pork can be purchased at a profitable price unlike some regional foods such as the mclobster roll or its peaches and mango pie the mcgrib has an international following and the world's pork supply is not diminishing it is always available in germany and luxembourg for the obvious reason it is profitable and mcdonald's has paid a premium to continuously offer it to be continuously offered in the united states either people's tastes would have to change or the price of pork relative to other foods would have to change in the meantime mcdonald's has found a way to use an otherwise unpopular but relatively unique products in the fast food world to bring more consumers in and maximize profits overall both on that product itself and others at their restaurants so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching

Channel: Today I Found Out

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Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020