McDonald's New Fall Menu Items: Great Concept, Lousy Execution

Where Are We, East Berlin?
It was cold outside, 28 degrees cold, as I pulled into the McDonald's parking lot at 6:00 AM.  And it was cold inside too; it always is here.  The management doesn't get that much dine-in business this early and figures to save money by keeping the heat down, knowing that the drive-thru customers won't know the difference.  Perhaps I should have chosen the drive-thru too but I'm here to try the new chocolate dipping sauce for their donut sticks, which have a very low mass relative to their exposed surface area and will lose their heat quickly.  I want to experience them at their absolute freshness, along with a medium serving of their latest McCafé offering, the Cinnamon Cookie Latte.  So I brace myself for the inhospitable chill and head inside.

Miscues and Miscommunications

McDonald's media communications and in-store video messaging are breathless with excitement about these two new seasonal items, but the person taking the order doesn't seem to be aware of them.  When I ask for the Cinnamon Cookie Latte, I get a blank stare.  I repeat the order request and she fumbles around with the touch screen terminal, struggling to find this cinnamon cookie thing, ultimately having to call over a supervisor to find it.  When the order finally comes, it's just the latte and the donut sticks, without any dipping sauce.  "What about the chocolate dipping sauce?" I cry out.  Oh yea, that.  It's in one of those little tubs with the peel-off foil, along with all the other McNugget sauces in their neighboring bins, a forlorn afterthought.   I wasn't expecting a heated ceramic ramekin or anything, but this isn't a good sign.

You can almost taste and smell the holiday cheer emanating from this promotional photo for the McCafé Cinnamon Cookie Latte and Chocolate Dipping Sauce.  Can the real thing live up to this?

The Consequences of Cold and Carelessness

There's the old joke about the two blue-haired ladies from Brooklyn at lunch.  One kvetches "oh, the food here is awful" and the other replies "yes, and the portions are so small!" Easy enough to laugh at this point of view but I'm feeling it right now as I stare at the freshly prepared latte that doesn't even come up to the fill line for, I presume, hot drip coffee. It seems quite the stingy portion.  But beyond that, it tastes so... uncookie-like?  Where's the warm sweetness that's supposed to call to mind cookies fresh from the oven? I can taste the somewhat acrid cinnamon floating on top of the limp foam, but otherwise there isn't much flavor at all in this tepid liquid whose temperature has already been dampened by the ambient chill.

My heart sank when I removed the lid off my McCafé cup and saw this drab, dingy mix of barely-warm milk and flavors.  The espresso shot and the cinnamon-sugar flavor seemed MIA.

Low Temps Claim Their Final Victim

Gathering myself from the first disappointment, I hoped my morning breakfast treat might rally on the strength of the warm donut sticks dipped in luscious chocolate sauce.  But it won't surprise you to hear that the actual chocolate sauce was not the warm, molten, freely flowing liquid from the promotional picture.  Rather it resembled slightly old and desiccated barbeque sauce...or lacquer...or maybe an accumulation of tobacco tar.  In the end, I settle upon Snack-Pak pudding, that shelf stable lunchbox treat of days past.  The cool temperatures have made the sauce stodgy and viscous.  How much so?  To submerge the end of the warm donut sticks into it, I have to jam the stick so hard that the fried dough almost crumples.  And to extract it, I have to hold the tub of brown stuff with my free other free hand so that it doesn't lift up off the tray when I bring the donut stick to my mouth.  Which is a shame, because if this sauce were kept slightly heated it would be pretty darn good.  The chocolate flavor is genuine and fairly intense.

There sits the chocolate sauce, inert, unwelcoming, and looking for all the world like a collected sample from the La Brea Tar Pit.

Oh, That's Where the Cinnamon Cookie Taste Went

As I'm wrapping up my visit, I get down to the last fourth of the Cinnamon Cookie Latte and the flavor starts to change. What once had been kind of bitter and bland suddenly becomes sickly sweet and syrupy like the smell of too many scented candles in one room.  And now I realize why I hadn't gotten much cinnamon cookie flavor all this time.  That flavor is all contained in the mixing syrup and the latte had been insufficiently stirred, with all the flavor lying concentrated at the bottom.  Who knows what this new drink tastes like at its best.  I'm sure I'll exert myself to find out at some point, but I'm in no hurry now.   The lesson here is that it doesn't matter how well conceived the ingredients shipped in from corporate are if the management and staff are too indifferent to treat them with proper care and serve them under the proper conditions.  I used to expect much better from McDonald's in terms of consistency of execution, but those days are becoming distant memories, like Golden Arches receding below the horizon.

McDonalds Affogato - An Off-Menu Sensation

A Way Forward in a Weary Landscape?
McDonald's is going through troubled times, seemingly unable to innovate or capture the public's imagination.  At a moment when the public is going ga-ga for Popeye's Chicken Sandwich, the Golden Arches have been unable to capitalize by drawing attention to their own chicken offerings because they're just too mediocre.  Their recently-released Spicy Barbecue Chicken Sandwich, which I'll review shortly, is not only unimpressive but a distinct step backwards in terms of the quality of the chicken filet.  News reports indicate that franchisees understand the problem but are waiting in vain for corporate leadership to lead the way on improved quality.

We may have to wait some time yet for McDonald's executives to stop playing chicken with their paltry poultry offerings, but franchisees might yet step forward, as they have in the past, with at least one new menu innovation that's ready and waiting to roll out and thrill customers.  Its components already exist at all McDonald's locations and enterprising eaters can construct their own if they're willing.  I'm talking about the "McDonald's Affogato".

Wait, What the Heck Is an Affogato?

The classic affogato, served with verve and style: ice cream combined with fresh, strong espresso for a rich, darkly creamy treat.

If you live remotely close to an urban center with a decent gelato shop, then chances are they offer affogato, a classically simple Italian dessert consisting of a scoop of gelato (slightly lower-fat Italian ice cream) topped with a shot of hot espresso.  The espresso melts some of the ice cream, creating a creamy coffee-sauce moat that surrounds the remaining ice cream, resulting in something like a coffee sundae.  The concentrated, dark-roasted espresso is delightfully adult, creating an uncommonly rich and sophisticated experience.  A decent affogato usually retails for at least $5 since it involves the labor of creating a fresh espresso shot and because the establishments that offer it are usually trying to create an upscale image and support upscale real-estate rents.  And therein lies an opportunity for McDonald's.

Engineering a McDonald's Affogato
Here it's crucial to remember that McDonald's already has the all the necessary components to create this dish, though this wasn't always the case.  But when McDonald's rolled out their McCafe line of coffee-based drinks, espresso was necessary as a base component for all the drinks from that derive from it, from Coffee Frappes to Mocha Lattes to Coffee Americanos to Hot Macchiatos.  All of these drinks get their start with a concentrated shot of espresso, which then gets diluted, often beyond recognition.  And yet the Real McCoy is still there, waiting to be exploited!  And if you're one of those people that just straight-up loves the taste of real espresso and doesn't mind having their high-brow profile undercut by drinking it out of a too-large styrofoam cup, you can actually enjoy a shot of excellent espresso under the arches for a mere one dollar.

You Don't Have to, But I'm Adding Fudge
The other ingredient in our affogato is, of course, ice cream.  McDonald's version is already lower in fat than normal ice cream, so it matches gelato fairly well.   If we were going for 100% authenticity, we would just order a cup of ice cream, but do you really think adding a little hot fudge (or caramel) would hurt?  Trust me, it doesn't.  As for strawberry topping, I ain't going there, but you do you.
 

Two great tastes that go great together are ready and waiting to make affogato magic.

Nope, it doesn't look like much, but this mighty shot of espresso punches way above its weight.

So, does everything go according to plan?  Absolutely.  Just dump the contents of the sundae (and not the reverse, lest you risk the coffee overflowing the sundae container) and the treat is ready to eat.  You can't distinguish this creation from an affogato from a high-end gelateria, at least not when the stout espresso is blurring away subtle flavor differences.  The coffee is bold, the soft serve is creamy, the hot fudge adds additional dimensions, and to experience this concoction is to escape to an oasis that seems so far removed from the confines of a typical fast-food joint that, while you're enjoying it, you may well forget where you are.  All for a mere $2.75 when you combine the cost of a McDonald's sundae with that of a single espresso shot.

No, it still ain't pretty, but look past the plastic spoon and the styrofoam cup, and you're enjoying the most complex-tasting dessert in the fast-food space.

A Strategic Opportunity
It's at this point that McDonald's needs to take the reins and upgrade this item further with some proper packaging and marketing.  It's not too much work to make this yourself, as I've demonstrated, but the presentation leaves something to be desired and I think those who don't thrill to the DIY experience would appreciate having the work of combining all these items done for them.  And I think McDonald's could command a slightly higher price point for doing this work.  It's a unique opportunity for McDonald's because there's no other fast-food operator that has the resources to currently pull this off.  Starbucks has espresso but they don't have ice cream (though they could get it easily enough).  Burger King has soft-serve ice cream, and Wendy's has their frosty, but neither makes coffee drinks that require espresso nor do they have the equipment infrastructure to produce it.  Dunkin' also has espresso, but no ice cream machine.  Baskin Robbins/Dunkin' dual locations could pull this off, but there aren't that many of those.  So for now, McDonald's has the field all to itself.

See, it's really not that hard. Just order your espresso and your sundae and get to mixing. What a bargain!

Regardless of what McDonald's does or doesn't do, dear reader, you owe it to yourself to either experience affogato for the first time, or revisit it at a lower cost and at greater convenience than you may have ever imagined.

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Regular Whopper vs. the Impossible Whopper (Food Kingdom Edition)

Burger v. Burger (If we Still Even Care About Burgers)
All the excitement over Popeye's Chick Fil-A-destroying fried chicken sandwich has somewhat eclipsed what had once been breathless hype over the Impossible Whopper.  With filet supplies exhausted at Popeye's nationwide for at least two weeks, this seemed to be a good time, now that the broiler smoke has cleared, to revisit the Impossible Whopper and see how it stacks up against one made with, presumably (an important presumption as DQ will tell you), real beef.

On the left, the Impossible Burger, on the right the Original Whopper.  Though this photo somewhat obscures the fact, they are both piled high with copious pickles, onions, lettuce, and tomato slices, and also slathered with ketchup, mustard, and mayo.  This served to obscure the differences between the two patties substantially, but not completely.
 

Live from Food Kingdom HQ, it's a Video Taste Test!


Conclusions
The Impossible Burger features what is, at this point, the best patty in the business, but the sandwich itself lacks the courage of its convictions.  Consumers want to taste this amazing new protein, not strain to discern its flavor profile because it's covered up with mounds of fixings and condiments.  Heme, the compound that tastes somewhat like real beef juices, is hard to detect here because of all the ketchup and mustard interference.  The fact that the flame broiling process burns off a lot of the heme liquids while imparting little smoke doesn't help either.  But if you're not paying attention, the Impossible Whopper tastes like, well... a Whopper, and that is worth celebrating.

McDonald's Chicken Biscuit: Yes, It's Bigger, But Is It Better?

Back in the Biscuit Game
It's easy to understand why McDonald's would want a chicken biscuit offering at breakfast time and beyond.  Despite sitting atop the fast food world with $36 billion in U.S. sales, more than double the sales of its closest chain competitor (Starbucks at $14 billion) and four times the sales of its closest category competitor (Wendy's at $9.5 billion) the arches are wobbly on a per-unit sales basis, compared to Chick-fil-A, which boasts a whopping $4.4 million dollars in sales per location, nearly double McDonald's $2.5 million.

Followers will always try to follow leaders and steal their thunder in some way.  This isn't even McDonald's first attempt to do so.  About five years ago they introduced their "Southern Chicken Sandwich", a blatant note-for-note ripoff of Chick-fil-A's signature sandwich, sporting a buttered steamed bun, pickles, and a steamy pressure-cooked filet.  They also offered a breakfast chicken biscuit that clearly imitated Chick-fil-A's breakfast offering.  Honestly, both were pretty good imitations of the original, but consumers just didn't respond and the items were discontinued.  Maybe McDonald's should have offered waffle fries too.

Going Big and Going Different
Despite this lack of initial success, the pull of added profit was strong and, perhaps because of the success of all-day breakfast and the resulting all-day availability of biscuits, McDonald's has decided to give it another go.  They've introduced a new chicken biscuit, initially alongside a lunch sandwich that shared the same fried chicken filet.  That new lunch sandwich, dubbed the "Classic Chicken Sandwich" was again a simple affair: a soft bun, a chicken filet, a little special sauce, and pickles.  Frankly, I loved it, and it was a bargain at only $3, but it has since been discontinued.  I'm not sure why, though I suspect that it may have been too good a deal, cannibalizing sales of the deluxe line of sandwiches.  But we shall not dwell on this sad happenstance, as there's nothing to be done about it.

The first thing you notice about the new breakfast biscuit, officially and ostentatiously named the Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Biscuit, is how huge the chicken filet is.  I mean, it's obnoxiously huge, suspiciously huge.  When I first saw it, I thought it must be a bunch of crust with some fake pressed chicken loaf inside, because the value proposition suggested by a real chicken filet of that magnitude seemed impossible.  The sandwich offers the tantalizing prospect of up to six bites of pure fried chicken in the morning before your teeth even make contact with the starchy biscuit.  Could this be too good to be true?

An early, evocatively lit encounter with McDonald's Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Biscuit.  Note how the filet extends way beyond the borders of biscuit, offering unadulterated crispy chicken delight.

Tasting and Testing for Real Chicken, and Going Head-to-Head
Initial tastings of the chicken biscuit left me more than satisfied, and the product tasted like real chicken, but I had to know for sure, so on a recent early morning, I passed through both McDonald's and Chick-fil-A's drive-thrus to collect specimens for careful analysis back at the Food Kingdom labs.  The results, in retrospect, make a great deal of sense.  McDonald's chicken biscuit, consistent with its appearance, does give you a bigger, heavier sandwich than does Chick-fil-A's, but then it's also a bit pricier, $3.18 with tax vs $2.75 with tax for its competitor.  Let's let the pictures tell much of the story now.

At the official weigh-in, we see McDonald's biscuit clock in at a hefty 6.2 ounces.

Chick-fil-A's biscuit, while less expensive, also provides significantly less to eat, weighing only 5.6 ounces, a full .6 ounces less.  Blasphemous, but true!

Ah, but perhaps you're thinking that the McDonald's offering gets its great weight from a heavier biscuit. But you would be wrong!  The chicken filet is a full .81 oz heavier than the original competitor!  Note that, true to its name, the coating on the McDonald's filet is crispy, full of irregular crunchy edges

The Chick-fil-A filet is, by contrast, steamy and moist, rather than crispy and, all things considered seems to be somewhat paltry poultry.

So we've established that Mickey-D's biscuit sandwich is larger and weightier, but underneath the chicken's crispy coating, do we have real chicken, or is it rather a patty, a glorified oversized chicken nugget, a McChicken in a biscuit?  Let's look inside and find out.

When we tear away the crunchy coating, we see a real breast filet, not chopped and formed chicken forcemeat.  Yes, it's pounded a bit thin, but your three bucks is buying you the real deal.  Incidentally, though it's largely hidden on the menu, McDonald's does offer an even cheaper chicken biscuit that really is the proverbial "McChicken on a biscuit".  It's not bad for what it is!

Ultimately, a Difference in Style

We've heaped a lot of abuse, at least, implicitly, on Chick-fil-A, noting how much smaller it is than McDonald's bold, swaggery, crispy-crunchy-juicy chicken breakfast sandwich.  Ultimately, though, I wouldn't say one is better than the other.  As noted, the smaller sandwich is also over 40 cents cheaper and might be all you really need for a tasty, reasonably satisfying breakfast.  Let's review the differences in taste to help you decide what's right for you.

Crispy, Savory, but a Little Dry
On the plus side, McDonald's chicken biscuit is nicely spiced– peppery with hints of oregano and other subtle notes that delight one's sense of scent, and subsequently one's palate.  Its crunchy coating is something you can really sink your teeth into.  It truly is fun to just eat fried chicken with your coffee before you even get to the biscuit part.  The biscuit too is quite respectable and the savory flavor profile interacts nicely with coffee.  However, because the chicken is pounded thin in order to be wider, you don't get as much tender chicken flesh to sink your teeth into as you do with Chick-fil-A.


On the Sweet Side
Often, flavor traits are only detectable in contrast to something else.  I've had Chick-fil-A's chicken biscuit dozens of times, but until I had one right after I'd eaten at McDonald's, I'd never noticed how sweet it was.  I'm talking cake-sweet, both the biscuit and to a slightly lesser extent the coating on the chicken.  It's not a bad thing, but it provides a strong contrast to the other product.  Once you notice the difference, you might find it offputting.  On the other hand, this sandwich does so many other things right. Unlike its competitor, this biscuit is lightly stained by dabs of melted butter, and the chicken is cooked more carefully so that it's still steamy and moist on the inside.  This is real Southern comfort food and McDonald's still can't quite match the mood that it conjures.  The Chick-fil-A biscuit is cozy; the McDonald's one is jazzy, energetic, ambitious and sassy.  I recommend enjoying both, depending upon your mood.

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The Secret Identity of McDonald's Donut Sticks

Off to a Bad Start
Your first experience with McDonald's Donut Sticks will be a feeling of getting cheated.  To be precise, you'll think they forgot to fill your order, instead handing you an empty bag.  Should you resist the urge to complain to the cashier and peek inside the bag, you'll see that the donut sticks are indeed there, but you'll still feel ripped off.  They're so light, so insubstantial.  How can they possibly provide value?
 

If McDonald's wants to convince the public that they're offering value for the dollar, they should serve these in a bag small enough for six donut sticks to fill.  Nobody likes to be handed a two-thirds empty bag.

Tasting Is Equivocating
Once you take a bite of your first donut stick, your mood will start to change, almost as if impelled by nature; you can't bite down on fluffy, salty, starch, fried in fat, and coated in sugar and cinnamon without an autonomic pleasure response.  Still, your neocortex might still assert itself and ask "but are these really donuts?"  If your Platonic conception of donuts begins with the template of the basic cake donut, hefty, sodden, and sweet fried batter that sits like a satisfying glutenous lump in your stomach and easily serves as a proxy for a filling breakfast, then the answer is surely no, these are not real donuts.  If, on the other hand, your idea of a donut is more like the classic Krispy Kreme donut -- a light, insubstantial sweet nothing that dissolves in your mouth and vanishes, like the last five minutes of dreaming before the alarm wakes you -- then these donut sticks dwell in the general vicinity of the donut.

There's a lot of air in there! No shame in that.  Puff pastry, croissants, and pate-aux-choux all operate on similar principles, but the consumer should not chew a donut stick unprepared, lest they think it somehow missed their mouths.

The Veil of Mystery Is Lifted
And yet...something still seems off.  You've tasted something like this before, but it wasn't called a donut, it was something else.  These sticks are so light and airy, with gigantic voids, bubbles, and pockets rendering them nearly hollow, a tender, sugar-dusted, chewy shell encasing sweet warm vapor.  They collapse with each bite, deflating to something scarcely thicker than a tortilla.  What do these remind us of?  Churros?  In flavor, certainly, but they seem more like dinner rolls or buns than churros, which again are not far from cake donuts, do.  And then it hits you: these are sticks of fry-bread, that Navajo invention created out of necessity from government flour, sugar, salt, and lard that's since become a staple of state fairs as much as of Native American culture.  Puffed up, bready, lighly coated in oil and enlivened with sugar and sometimes other spices.  Once you accept that this is what McDonald's has decided to serve you, labels be damned, all your quibbles will disappear and you can enjoy them like the magically addictive treats that they are.

Enlarged to show texture and you can clearly see that a more accurate description of the product would be "fry-bread sticks."

Eating Strategies
McDonald's Donut Sticks come in two order sizes, the 6-piece and the 12-piece.  Because they're so light, it's quite easy to consume 12, but because they're so rich you may regret it afterwards; you'll start to feel sick before you start to feel full.  I recommend starting with six and seeing if you can be content with that.  They even offer a combo of six sticks and a small coffee for $3 and change, a prudent nudge I would say.


The other thing every eater must decide for themselves is what to do with the leftover cinnamon sugar that remains in the bottom of the bag or, if you dump them out onto your tray, then on your paper tray cover or napkin.  You can try to incorporate some of it back into the donut stick itself by dipping the exposed bitten end into the layer of sugar after each bite uncovers a new bit of donut cross-section, but that is unlikely to use it all up.  At that point, you're either the kind of person who will lick your fingertip, dip that moist fingertip it into the sugar to retrieve some of it, and then lick your finger again...or you're not.  It is very unlikely that any of us have the fortitude to consume all the excess cinnamon sugar.  That's ok.  It's alright to sometimes leave something on the table, as it were.

The messy aftermath of a session with 12 (sorry, not sorry) donut sticks. There is no way to quickly consume all this grease-inflected cinnamon sugar and I advise against attempting to devise one.

A Starbucks Killer?
It puzzles the more rational among us that Starbucks created a multi-billion-dollar empire off pedestrian coffee with syrup and whipped cream.  How a tablespoon of syrup and a 1/2 cup of whipped cream adds $3 of value I'll never understand, and it was entirely understandable that McDonald's thought they could undercut Starbucks, offering an identical product for about 35% less cost.  But consumers tend to behave as sentimentally as rationally and McDonald's will never recreate the upscale oasis ambience that engenders such customer loyalty to the Seattle chain.  That said, McDonald's has created at least one warm, sweet reason to at least occasionally park under the Golden Arches for your morning caffeine fix.