The Surprising Breakfast Condiments That Used To Come With McDonald's Egg McMuffin

McDonald's Egg McMuffin was rolled out nationwide in 1975, and to celebrate 50 years of the iconic breakfast menu staple, the fast food chain had a flurry of offers in early 2025. The golden jubilee is also a good time to look at the sandwich's interesting history and how it was initially designed to be a cheaper version of the classic breakfast dish, eggs Benedict. Herb Peterson, a McDonald's franchisee from California, came up with the original Egg McMuffin, though it wasn't called that at the time. The sandwich was meant to be part of McDonald's first foray into a breakfast menu in the United States, and Peterson wanted to create a portable sandwich version of breakfast classics in order to fit the fast food format.

With R&D departments not as common at the time, new item ideas often took quite a colorful route from inception to becoming menu fixtures. The Filet-O-Fish had to win a competition against a no-meat burger to be embraced by the higher-ups at McDonald's, and was still modified before being added to the menu. Early iterations of the Egg McMuffin also happen to be quite interesting, with one particularly wild iteration that came with a choice of honey or jam. This version, an open-faced sandwich layered with egg, Canadian bacon, and a slice of cheese, was served with the sweet breakfast condiments on the side. While it's unclear how long it was available for, it's quite possible that it was served at Peterson's Santa Barbara outlets, which still have plaques proclaiming that they were the restaurants where the Egg McMuffin was first introduced to America.

As anyone who enjoys a drizzle of maple syrup at breakfast can attest, a little bit of a sweet condiment can really spruce up a salty breakfast, especially when there's bacon involved. It's easy to see why some jam or honey was tested out with the Egg McMuffin, considering the goal was to make the fast food version of a classic breakfast. However, condiments on the side also seem to go against what the breakfast sandwich was attempting to achieve.

In a 1987 interview (via the KEYT News Video Archive) filmed to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Egg McMuffin, Herb Peterson explained how the sandwich was meant to be as easy to hold and eat as a hamburger, perhaps even single-handedly, given its smaller size. Condiments on the side complicate matters, and Peterson had also done away with an earlier idea of packaged hollandaise sauce. Fittingly, the current Egg McMuffin does include a breakfast condiment — salted butter — but it comes already incorporated in the sandwich and not on the side.

It's worth noting how far Peterson went to keep the Egg McMuffin self-contained and evenly round. He even innovated the Teflon rings used to give the egg its signature round shape. In fact, if you want to make a copycat Egg McMuffin at home, you can simply use the lidless metal ring used to seal a Mason jar to shape the egg into a round slab. And if your curiosity is piqued by knowing about the sweet accompaniments that came with the test version of the Egg McMuffin, try yours with some jelly or honey the next time you're enjoying the breakfast classic.