Secret Sauce

You deserve a break today

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

07/14/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/secretsauce.htm

Back a couple of years ago, Kathy, who worked at the front of the building, poked her head in the door of my office and announced that she was going to McDonalds, and did I want anything?

I started to say no, and on a whim, told her to get me a Big Mac. I hadn’t had one since about 1978, and from what I could see on the TV ads, it looked like they had sharply improved them since then. Bigger, juicier, and of course, now the patties were "all-beef." In 1978, Big Macs were dry, tasteless, and not very good for you. The meat was grey and thin, and the vegetables were wilted and zestless. About the only good thing about them, in my opinion, was the condiments. Surely in nearly 24 years, progress had been made.

Kathy reappeared with a Big Mac, wrapped, I noted approvingly, in biodegradable paper, rather than the cardboard and polyurethane containers they used to come in.

This Mac was tasteless. The meat was still two juiceless grey slabs, thinner than I remembered. The lettuce was still wilted, and the other veggies looked and tasted like various unidentifiable vegetative matter had been run through molding devices and food coloring added to make them resemble pickles, onions, and whatever that strange yellow sheet of petroleum was that clung desperately to the meat. The thing looked a lot smaller than I remembered, too. And the condiments seemed to only be barely there.

That pretty much put an end to the Mac Attack. I am not bragging, by the way: "Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue." Most people don’t eat things they don’t like.

But I was struck by the fact that the 2002 version of the Big Mac was substantially worse than the sandwich of hazy 1978 memory. The incident served as an object lesson in the level of deceit practiced in advertising these days, where McDonalds can get away with showing pictures of Big Macs that look huge, juicy, crisp and tasty.

Apparently, the decline in quality at McDonalds wasn’t my imagination. Through the 1990s, penny-pinchers at corporate had cheapened and downsized the items on the menu, with the result that food quality – and eventually, sales – dropped sharply.

So much so, according to reporters David Greising and Jim Kirk at The Chicago Tribune, that McDonalds lured Fred Turner, a man who worked for Ray Kroc right from the start, out of retirement to turn things around.

According to the story, Turner knew what was wrong with McDonalds before they even contacted him. He had tasted the stuff the local restaurants were selling. McDonalds wasn’t exactly haute cuisine to begin with, but the stuff going out the doors at the turn of the century was pure crap.

So when CEO Jim Cantalupo got him to come in and start upgrading the food, the first thing he did was tell the company that they were going to get rid of the pink chunky crap they were splashing on the Big Macs and go back to the original, legendary "secret sauce."

That’s right, folks; McDonalds had stopped putting secret sauce on the Big Macs. This was like learning that Ronald McDonald was selling cocaine cut with sugar, or baggies filled with oregano (I’m sure Ronald has lots of sugar to spare; I’m not so sure he has any oregano, though).

The article notes that "secret sauce" is the stuff of advertising legend, like the "secret recipe" for Colonel Sanders’ chicken, or the actual ingredients in Coke.

Anyone remember "New Coke?" McDonalds was smart enough to not announce that they were replacing the secret sauce, which is probably why they are still in business, but the consumers were noticing anyway. The Big Mac was following the vomit-splattered trail of New Coke.

"Bring back the secret sauce!" said Turner. "Slather those all two beef patties! Make them SWIM in that shit!" Or maybe he said something sort of like t hat.

That’s when white, apprehensive corporate underlings scuttled sideways up to Turner. Nothing remarkable here; corporate underlings are, by their nature, white, apprehensive, and prone to scuttling, along with bowing and scraping. The news they gave to Turner, however, was quite remarkable.

McDonalds had lost the recipe to the secret sauce. They didn’t lose it through corporate merger or lawsuit, the way most people lose things of value in the corporate world; they simply only had one copy of the recipe, and nobody knew where it was.

Personally, I think they should have a talk with that dog who hawks Bush Beans.

Try to imagine the President, looking off into the middle distance with an entirely vacant expression as he wonders dimly if he left the nuclear codes "football" in that hotel room in Peking.

OK, that one’s pretty easy to imagine. Try this: the coach of the Green Bay Packers accidently leaves a copy of the team playbook in a hotel in Dallas.

There is a definite potential for embarrassment when something like this occurs.

It’s actually pretty easy to imagine how it could happen. Proprietary secrets are rife in the corporate food world, to the point where pizza joints are known to have new hires sign non-disclosure agreements before teaching them how to slap a pizza together. A typical large corporation, especially one in the highly competitive junk food industry, makes the old Soviet Union look open and trusting in comparison.

So McDonalds probably never had more than a half dozen copies of the recipe to begin with, and never left it in the hands of anyone who didn’t have an immediate need for it, and who had agreed to sign over their first born if they so much admitted that there WAS such a thing as "secret sauce." This came up against a second tenet of corporate-think: that the minute something becomes "yesterday’s model" it ceases to have any value at all. So there may have only been one copy of the old, expensive stuff left, and nobody bothered to remember where they put it. It died in service as a cocktail napkin, maybe, or an impromptu mouse pad.

According to Turner, he was able to dig up a guy he worked with 36 years ago on fabricating the secret sauce, and lo and behold, he had a copy. Given how unsentimental large corporations tend to be about such things, it’s pretty unlikely that McDonalds KNEW he had a copy, but they weren’t in much of a position to complain.

So they have their secret sauce back, and lived happily ever after.

Except, of course, that a few months later, the CEO dropped dead at age 60 of a heart attack, and two weeks after that, his replacement was diagnosed with colon cancer, but that’s probably because they ate fresh vegetables, avoided starchy foods, and got lots of protein and fiber.

Stuff will get you every time.