The Origin of the Egg McMuffin

...Peterson believed that to launch an entirely new food line, such as breakfast, McDonald's needed something unique and yet something that could be eaten like all other McDonald's items--with the fingers. His solution came when he started modifying an Eggs Benedict sandwich that was being marketed by Jack-in-the-Box, a West Coast chain.

By Christmas of 1971, Peterson had been working on the product for months. he had experimented with prepackaged Hollandaise, which he rejected as too runny. He replaced it instead with a slice of cheese, which when melted on a hot egg produced the consistency he was looking for. He also had to develop a foolproof way of preparing an egg on a grill to give it the appearance of a poached egg. Poaching eggs did not fit with McDonald's assembly line production process, but Peterson solved the problem by developing a new cooking utensil--a cluster of six Teflon-coated rings--that was placed on the grill to give eggs the rounded shape of an English muffin. When he added

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grilled Canadian bacon, Peterson had a breakfast product perfect for a sandwich-oriented fast-food chain.

Kroc was celebrating Christmas that year at his new ranch just north of Santa Barbara, and Peterson asked him to stop by the store. When Kroc showed up, Peterson was ready with a demonstration of his surprise new product, complete with a flip-chart presentation to explain its economics. It was not economics that sold Kroc. He had just finished lunch before stopping by Peterson's store, but he devoured two of the new egg-bacon-muffin sandwiches anyway. At Kroc's request, Peterson two weeks later packed the Teflon rings in a briefcase and flew to Chicago to prepare his new breakfast sandwich for the rest of McDonald's senior managers, all of whom responded as positively as Kroc had.

McDonald's was ready to test the product nationwide, as soon as it settled on a name. Peterson favored calling it McDonald's Fast Break Breakfast, but the name had been copyrighted--though never used--by Nabisco. McDonald's had not yet reached the level of marketing sophistication that involved building an inventory of brand names. Peterson's concoction was homespun, and it's name would come the same name way. As the Turners and Krocs dined out one evening, Patty Turner suggested calling it the Egg McMuffin. The name stuck.

It took nearly four years to roll the Egg McMuffin out nationwide. Part of the problem was that the Egg McMuffin, although suitable as the center of a breakfast menu, was not suited to be an entire breakfast menu. But when Delligatti's hotcakes and sausage were perfected and when scrambled eggs were added as a third option, McDonald's by 1976 had finally expanded throughout the system a breakfast menu that distinguished it from its major fast-food competitors, which did not introduce commercial breakfast items until the mid-1980s. By then, McDonald's--thanks largely to the inventiveness of its franchisees--had a monopoly on breakfast. Accounting for 15 percent of its sales, the breakfast menu provides the biggest single reason for the enormous sales lead McDonald's restaurants maintain over their competition. (In 1991, the average McDonald's restaurant generated sales of $1.66 million, compared with $1 million and $852,000 respectively, for Burger King and Wendy's.)

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