From Today I Found Out.
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Seeing your children smile and giggle with delight is one of life’s most rewarding experiences, alongside watching kids who bullied them trip and fall flat on the pavement. On the former, sometimes, all it takes is to treat your adorable little human parasites to a tasty, fun-sized meal accompanied by a popular, collectible toy – all packaged within a small, colourful paperboard box. The same elements can also induce delightful fits of laughter amongst senior executives and board members when they report to the CEO of the McDonald’s Corporation.
That small aforementioned box is obviously the Happy Meal, one of the greatest success stories in the fast food industry – and possibly one of the most profitable product concepts to emerge in the late 20th century. To give context here, in recent years McDonald’s 41,000 restaurants around the world sell over 1.2 billion Happy Meals every year generating some $7 billion annually.
Besides their impact on the bottom line, Happy Meals appear to have a disproportionately large cultural influence: they occupy a vast chunk of nostalgic real estate in collective consciousness, have been identified as a key factor in exporting certain Americanisms outside of the US, and are a great gateway drug getting kids locked into being used to going to McDonalds.
On this note, Happy Meals have also attracted a great deal of criticism, as the inclusion of popular toys encourages children to consume high calorie meals that aren’t exactly known for being the pinnacle of healthy, with anyone with kids knowing when our little ankle biters want a specific toy in a given Happy Meal’s set, they will often beg to go to McDonald’s continually until they get it.
But what business genius actually thought up the idea of the Happy Meal in the first place?
Well, fascinatingly, while the history section of McDonald’s corporate website clearly lists the dates of invention of some of their staples such as the Big Mac, the Egg McMuffin, the McFlurry, as well as the names and surnames of their creators, there is not one single mention of the Happy Meal here, let alone who invented it and when. And, it turns out, for very good reason as we’ll get into.
So let’s dive into it all, shall we?
Author: Arnaldo Teodorani
Host: Daven Hiskey
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Caden Nielsen
