McDonald's Best-Selling Menu Item Comes As No Surprise

Despite being known for its classic Big Mac (which it didn't fully invent, by the way), McNuggets, and Happy Meals, there's one item on McDonald's menu that outsells the rest and it's none of the previous items I just listed. Give up? It's the fries. This probably doesn't come as a surprise, since so many people laud the chain for their hard-to-resist flavor, especially when they're straight out of the fryer and sprinkled with a generous amount of salt. (When they get old, however, I think it's a universal sentiment that they can become a real disappointment.)

It's been reported in previous years that the chain puts out a stunning nine million pounds of the fried spuds every day — they're that popular. Good thing you can get a free medium order of them through the app with a $1 minimum purchase on Fridays right now. Don't worry, before you get all suspicious, I'm no secret McDonald's rep. If you've followed me for long enough, you know that I just love making sure you all receive free food when you can get it. It might as well be the one thing everyone orders when they're idling in the drive-thru. 

Though this might be hard to believe, McDonald's didn't always serve those seemingly eternally-famed fries. The first McDonald's location was founded in 1940 by brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald and fries weren't actually put on the menu until nearly 10 years later in 1949. They would replace the spot of potato chips, though I can't imagine a world where McDonald's served chips over fries. 

Notably, the fries back then also used to be cut fresh and were cooked in beef tallow – a fact I think we all now consider common popular food knowledge. Now they arrive at stores frozen to be cooked in vegetable oil and contain a whole host of additives like natural beef flavoring and sodium acid pyrophosphate (to keep them from browning), but apparently those changes haven't prevented them from keeping the bestselling spot at the Golden Arches. Secretly, I think some of us are ordering fries with a Big Mac on the side — not the other way around.