McDouble's Consequences for the Double Cheeseburger: through the prism of a made-to-order system

When McDonald's removed its venerable Double Cheeseburger from its Dollar Menu last month, replacing it with the near-equivalent McDouble, shudders surely ran through the souls of value-loving fast food consumers everywhere. This, it was thought, was the end of an era we would all fondly remember but which we knew was too good to last. After all, McD had been selling the Double Cheeseburger at a loss for some time. Just think about it: a regular size bun, two beef patties, two slices of cheese, pickles, onions, ketchup and mustard, plus labor and overhead, all for 99 cents? No wonder franchisees had been chafing at this arrangement, finding it difficult to profit at that price point, even given the fact that customers would often add high-margin items like sodas to their orders.

So the McDouble was always inevitable, and the remarkable thing really is that so little has been compromised in its construction. Essentially, the McDouble is identical to the beloved Double Cheeseburger. The only thing that has been removed is the extra slice of cheese. I'd never have guessed that this would be the thing to reduce costs. I always figured cheese kind of grew on trees, brought up as I was by stories of surplus government cheese. So the McDouble is a fine compromise, an honorable substitute, especially considering that the Double Cheeseburger is still available for the slightly higher price of $1.19...ah, but there's the rub. This little adjustment in price has had perhaps unintentional ripple effects in the quality control chain at McDonald's, serving as a fine object lesson in how even the most quality and detail-oriented chains can fail to forsee all the downstream effects of any given business decision. And it all goes back to a major quality improvement initiative from the late 90s or early years of this milennium:

wait for it....

THE MADE-TO-ORDER SYSTEM

As the name implies, the made-to-order system is a system in which no menu-item is assembled by the kitchen staff until the moment that the customer orders it, ensuring as fresh-as-possible product is presented to the customer. No more dessicated chicken fillet sandwiches, their chicken patties dry as leather and having lost 20% of their weight through moisture loss. No more cheeseburgers featuring American cheese slices with orange curled-up corners. All menu item elements would be held at optimal humidity and temperature conditions until ready for assembly. Now, for most menu items, this is the ideal approach, particularly for chicken items whose popularity has surged in recent years, if their ubiquity on menus is any indication. The same would hold (no pun intended) for salads, where warm elements like chicken come into contact with ingredients like salad greens best presented chilled. If you're trying to exert control over each individual component of a dish, it must be assembled right before serving. This, after all, is how it's done at high-end dining establishments. But could there be instances where fresher is NOT always better?

ENTER THE DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER - an item which benefits from holding.

American cheese is a funny thing, at least in my opinion. You couldn't pay me to eat a slice of processed American cheese when chilled. At that temperature, it's artificial, chemical notes come to the fore, its stabilizers and gums, all of the things that normal cheese does not require, and would not benefit from, are all more noticable. But when you heat it, when that slice of cheese begins to wilt and become, if you will ,"melty" (expect a whole other post on that loaded term in the future) and a pleasant alchemy occurs. Suddenty the fats precipitate out and blend with whatever else is present in the dish, creating a richer gestalt than one ever would have imagined. This occurs in the best possible way with a nice hot Double Cheeseburger with nicely melted cheese slices: the liquid beef fats merge with the semi-liquid cheese oils which in turn meld with the onion and pickle juices and the ketchup and the mustard. It's a divine experience at either 99 cents or $1.19 (the new price). The problem is that the made-to-order system prevents this from happening at the higher price point.

Why? Well, when the Double Cheeseburger was priced at 99 cents it was quite popular and even though each individual cheeseburger was made-to-order, if multiple orders, let's say 5, were placed at once, a queue would inevitably form in the heated holding area where the sandwiches were placed after assembly and as each cheeseburger waited there in the heated area for a staffer to pick it up, the cheese slices would continue to melt past the point they had melted at the moment of assembly. So while the item was fresh, the delays in picking up the sandwich from its holding area, given the overall business and volume of orders, was sufficient to let this melting take place. There was never any telling whose McDouble you were getting as they all got mixed up in the queue. You might be getting the McDouble created in response to your order, but you might have gotten one that had been sitting there for a good five minutes, melting while more recently created sandwiches were picked up. When there are multiple versions of any given item, they all get mixed up and there's no guarantee that the one that gets picked is the most recently made. Chances are better that the sandwich you got had been sitting for a while, improving as the cheese melted.

Now, however, if you order the Double Cheeseburger, you're in the minority and your order sticks out like a sore thumb. It's unlikely that your cheeseburger will get neglected, benefiting, however inadvertently from the salutary additional melting that makes the sandwich taste best. Rather, it will be spotted by an employee the moment it comes down the chute, and rescued from its holding pen at the soonest opportunity, presented to you before the cheese has a chance to reach its ideal temperature and melting point. In other words, you're more likely to get it fresh, which in the case of the Double Cheeseburger, is worse.

This is not empty theorizing, by the way. This post is a reaction to the experiences I've had with the Double Cheeseburger ever since it came off the value menu. It's still a fine sandwich, and occasionally, it's still served with its two slices of cheese fully melted. But this happens much less frequently, and this has been my attempt to explain why. The made-to-order system. A brilliant innovation but one that perhaps needs further refinement.

One final note: I have not forgotten my pledge to review the Cheesy Bacon Wrap from BK. But willing one's self to suffer is not as easy as it seems when one first makes the pledge to do so.