There's A Reason You Can Sing What's On A Big Mac, Even If You Weren't Born In The '70s

It was an earworm before the term earworm was coined to describe a song that gets stuck in your head for hours on end. It hardly had the rhythm, message, or musical chops of "You Deserve a Break Today," the fast food giant's signature song famously written by a young jingle writer named Barry Manilow. But ask anyone to recite the 1974 McDonald's jingle listing the ingredients of the Big Mac and they'll likely repeat it right back to you: "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun." And that, one of the jingle's creators told the New York Times, is exactly how they planned it.

Noting that music is a great mnemonic, Keith Reinhard, who directed the team at Needham, Harper & Steers that created the jingle, told his colleagues, "Remember how we told our kids to learn the ABCs with sort of a dumb tuneless chant?" That's when another team member started strumming his guitar while reciting the Big Mac ingredients, and they knew they had their new campaign. In the ads, McDonald's customers are asked to recite the seven ingredients in the Big Mac and stumble badly, the jingle playing over their mangled words.

The jingle may not have had the chart-topping power of the year's other musical hits, like "Dancing Machine" by the Jackson Five or "Bennie and the Jets" by Elton John, but it definitely had the staying power. In 2008, to celebrate the 40th birthday of the Big Mac, McDonald's asked consumers to rewrite the music to the jingle, submitting their tunes via the now-defunct social media site MySpace. The winner was Jason Harper from Boynton Beach, Florida, whose rap-inspired version won with 47% of the vote.

The Big Mac came to be in 1967 when McDonald's franchisee Jim Delligatti noted the success of the Big Boy sandwich at Big Boy restaurants and introduced a similar sandwich to his Pittsburgh restaurants. The Big Mac was added to McDonald's menu nationwide the following year. But although many wanted to call the new sandwich the Blue Ribbon Burger, one of the fun facts about McDonald's Big Mac is that a secretary in McDonald's advertising department named Esther Glickstein Rose was the one who came up with the winning name.

Now, nearly 60 years later, the Big Mac is still made with the same seven ingredients. Although the jingle revealed all of the components in a Big Mac, the recipe for the special sauce has remained a secret. A former corporate chef for McDonald's, however, shared his recipe for recreating the special sauce at home on TikTok.