The Astounding Number Of Burgers That McDonald's Sells In A Day

Legend has it a pickle sprouts in burger paradise every time a McDonald's patty gets flipped. And that's often because it takes a speedy system to churn out the heaping amount of beef the world's largest fast-food burger chain serves up on a massive scale every day. One of the multinational's traditions was boasting about the billions and billions of hamburgers they've sold over the years. 

From the classic Big Mac to popular sandwiches like the Quarter Pounder and McDouble, Mickey D's has spent decades cooking up more beef than Drake and Kendrick Lamar trapped in a butcher shop. Continuously seared for a pre-specific time on each side to lock in the flavors and moisture, a McDonald's hamburger can be cooked and prepared in 112 seconds flat from the time it's ordered. 

Speed and precision are cornerstones of the assembly-line kitchen process founding brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald developed when they pioneered the concept of fast food. McDonald's still employs parts of their streamlined technique today to crank out orders. 

So let's take a stab at the inconceivable and try tallying the amount of hamburgers McDonald's sells on a daily basis. It's an exercise in billion-dollar arithmetic based on best guesstimates of an empire with more than 40,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. 

McDonald's sold nearly 6.5 billion burgers in 2021, according to several sources. But that number's much too unwieldy to make sense of. Looking for a more manageable coefficient to plug into our formula, let's lean on another oft-cited statistic, which is the fact that McDonald's serves about 75 hamburgers per second around the world. That's a better reflection of the operation's sustained pace, and serves as a good entry point for our assessment. There are 86,400 ticks around the clock every 24 hours, which means McDonald's slings nearly 6.48 million burgers each day. Over the course of a full calendar year, that amounts to more than 2.36 billion all-beef patties served up worldwide.

McDonald's signs stopped keeping track of the number of burgers sold in 1994. But the franchise closed in on selling its 300 billionth burger over a decade ago, Wall Street Journal reported in 2013. Industry insiders now estimate Ronald and company must be eyeing 400 billion sold, if they haven't already eclipsed that. Whatever the case, the company continues to thrive, so don't expect those red and gold marquees to be disappearing from the busiest blocks anytime soon.