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For more than four decades, four words in fast food have captured the appetites and imaginations of millions of people around the world who crave a guilty pleasure for a limited time: “The McRib is back.”
While the barbecue-flavored pork sandwich wasn’t an immediate success at McDonald’s and seemed doomed, something unusual happened that suggested the McRib wouldn’t be an easy kill: There weren’t enough chickens to compete with the hugely successful chicken McNuggets. McDonald’s needed another popular product to promote at its locations, and in 1981, McDonald’s executive chef René Arend knew it was time to push the McRib as a viable alternative.
“The McNuggets were so well received that every franchise wanted them. There was no system to supply enough chicken,” Arend, who invented McRib and McNuggets, told Maxim in 2009. “We had to come up with something to offer the other franchises a new product. “So the McRib came about because of the chicken shortage.”
The decision put the McRib on the map and made the sandwich — with retextured pork in the shape of a miniature rib, barbecue sauce, onions and pickles on a housemade bun — a culinary oddity that has established itself as one of the greatest limited editions has. Time attractions in fast food history. The McRib was hailed as a cultural phenomenon by fans and viewed as an abomination by critics. It’s been parodied by shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy, while McRib has been killed and brought back more times than Michael Myers in Halloween.
“I’m sure he would be happy if some of his creativity and ingenuity, as well as that of his kitchen team, lived on through the sale of the McRib,” said Lucy Habeck, Arend’s daughter. Arend died in August 2016 at age 88, she said.
Nearly a year after the sandwich’s final “farewell tour,” McDonald’s announced Wednesday that — spoiler alert — the McRib is back. The McRib will be available in limited markets starting in November, the company announced. It’s unclear where exactly the McRib will be available.
“It turns out not everyone was ready to say goodbye to the McRib,” the company said in a press release.
The McRib is a toxic friend and we need to stop falling behind
Although the McRib has a loyal following, including an online tracker to help find the elusive sandwich, fast food consumers haven’t always had a craving for a pork product. The National Pork Producers Council wanted to change that. In the 1970s, Roger Mandigo, an animal science professor at the University of Nebraska, was approached to develop a product made from pork trimmings that could be sold to fast food companies. The lobbying group had a specific company in mind.
“Pork producers wanted to see more pork on the menu and had McDonald’s in their sights,” Mandigo told NPR in 2011.
The request made Mandigo a pioneer in restructured meat products, usually made from low-quality meat scraps that were reduced in size through comminution, such as flaking, mincing, or slicing. As Mandigo explained with his colleagues in a paper published by the university in 1995, a ground meat mixture is mixed with salt and water to extract salt-soluble proteins, which in turn create a “glue” that holds the pieces of meat muscle together. The muscle pieces can then be formed into a “meat log” with a specific shape and cut into steaks or chops that, when cooked, resemble their intact muscle counterparts in appearance and texture.
“Most people would be extremely unhappy if their heart or tongue were served to them on a plate,” Mandigo said in “Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart,” a 2008 book by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz. “But if it becomes a restructured product, it loses its identity. Products such as tripe, hearts and boiled stomachs are high in protein, completely edible, wholesome and nutritious and most are already safely used in sausages.”
Once the technology was installed, inspiration for the McRib came from Arend, a then 31-year-old chef who had cooked at luxury hotels in the United States and Europe and served guests such as Queen Elizabeth and Cary Grant. Arend was lured away from his fine-dining gigs by the stability, salary and benefits that McDonald’s could offer – and by the challenge of expanding the chain’s menu options.
“They asked me to come to McDonald’s several times. I said, ‘I’m a chef, I don’t believe in hamburgers,'” Arend recalled to The New York Times in 1981. “But when I came, I wanted to do for the people out there on the streets what I wanted done for the rich.”
Habeck said of her father, “One of the things he most enjoyed was producing food for the masses, and his position at McDonald’s gave him the opportunity to do just that.”
The idea for the McRib came to him after enjoying a Southern barbecue in 2009, he said.
“I had just gotten back from Charleston, South Carolina, where I ate pulled pork sandwiches,” Arend told Maxim. “I said to myself, ‘Something with this flavor should really be done.'”
But Arend didn’t want to make a pulled pork sandwich. Instead, he wanted a boneless pork sandwich that could fool people into thinking they were eating a piece of ribs.
“Some thought, ‘Why not just make it round?’ It would have been easier,” Arend told the magazine. “But I wanted it to look like ribeye.”
The creation of the McRib was necessary after the McNuggets exceeded all expectations and made McDonald’s one of the largest chicken retailers in the world. The company also did the same for pork. Mandigo told the Associated Press in 1982 that McDonald’s was buying up to 1.5 million pounds of pork shoulder weekly from a national supply of 2.4 million to 4 million pounds.
“This appears to be the most successful new product that McDonald’s has launched since the Big Mac,” Merrill Lynch analyst William Trainer told the AP at the time. McDonald’s capitalized on the sandwich’s uniqueness and ran ads for “a new kind of queue.”
Despite its initial success when it was introduced to menus in the Kansas City area in 1981, sales declined so much that the company announced that the McRib would never return.
“The ribs did not meet our expectations as a sandwich and McDonald’s is exploring other options to make it a success,” McDonald’s spokeswoman Stephanie Skurdy told the Toronto Star in 1983. “We are trying…to decide whether to discontinue the product.”
It was one of many times the company said the sandwich would disappear, only to bring it back. The McRib enjoyed continued success in Germany and Luxembourg and has returned to American stores as a special attraction. The sandwich experienced an advertising boost in the summer of 1994 during a promotion for the theatrical release of “The Flintstones.”
Since then, McDonald’s has hosted at least four “farewell tours” for the sandwich in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2022.
While some have tried to credit Mandigo as the inventor of the McRib, the meat scientist insists that Arend and McDonald’s created the sandwich. He just gave them the technology to do this in the middle of a Chicken McNugget crisis.
“We played an important role in the technology of joining pieces of meat together,” he told the Lincoln Journal Star in 2010. “I didn’t invent the McRib sandwich. McDonald’s did this.”
Habeck said her father “would be thrilled that his grandchildren Ryan and Sarah could enjoy his creations.”
“He truly beamed as he watched generations of children enjoy McNuggets and McRibs,” she said, “and it would be his fondest wish that children everywhere and their parents continue to enjoy these McDonald’s favorites.”