Meet The Grandma Behind McDonald's Fried Apple Pie Recipe From The '60s

One of McDonald's best-loved menu items started with a woman named Jo Cochran and her husband, Litton, in East Tennessee in the 1960s. Jo created the restaurant chain's famous original fried apple pie, which returned to select locations for a limited time in June 2026. Jo was the grandmother of Eric Cochran, who owns nine of the fast food restaurant locations in the Knoxville area (as of July 2025). She and Litton once owned and operated a whopping 40 McDonald's stores and knew the franchise's founder, Ray Kroc. 

When Kroc wanted to add a dessert to the menu, Litton suggested the Southern favorite, and he and Jo began crafting a recipe. This labor of love continued every night for a couple months as Jo experimented with different combinations of fillings, crusts, and spices, using their children as taste testers, Eric told 10News WBIR in 2025. Jo cooked the small pies in special molds that are now family heirlooms. Once she and Litton had a version they and their kids were happy with, she whipped up a pie in person for Kroc, who loved it. They found a bakery, and in 1968, the fried apple pie debuted at McDonald's, the brand's first-ever dessert — which, like the Egg McMuffin, Big Mac, and Filet-o-Fish, became one of the chain's biggest hits. Over the years, pies have been made with various kinds of apples, including Golden Delicious, Gala, Ida Red, and Fuji.

In 1992, McDonald's swapped the fried apple pie for a baked version to appeal to more health-conscious customers. A large contingent of the patrons weren't happy with the change. Certain restaurants went rogue, continuing to offer the original fried apple pie, though most made the switch. So, for a lot of folks, the return of the OG fried pie has been a long time coming.

Jo Cochran was born in Harlan, Kentucky in 1923. She and Litton met and fell in love at the University of Tennessee, later marrying in 1944. Together, they opened Tennessee's first McDonald's restaurant in 1960. "Nobody in Knoxville had ever, ever heard of McDonald's," Jo Cochran said of one of America's oldest existing chain restaurants in an interview with WBIR in 2000. "All that day that we opened, I spent driving around the block, time after time after time, and turning very, very slowly into McDonald's. And everybody — I hoped — would follow me in," she added, showing her dedication to the business even before creating the beloved apple pie. 

Litton handled most of the operations, and Jo helped part-time with bookkeeping and other tasks. But after 43 years of marriage, Litton died in 1987, when Eric was just a young boy. Consequently, Jo had to assume greater responsibilities at the McDonald's restaurants they owned and operated, delving more deeply into the burgers and other facets of the business in order to maintain control of the franchise, Eric Cochran told WBIR. Still, she would remain best known as "the apple pie grandmom" of McDonald's, as she said in her own WBIR interview. When asked whether she received a commission on each apple pie sold, she smiled and said, "No, we just get credit."

Jo and her husband were also known as pillars of the community, helping to found the Knoxville Ronald McDonald House in the 1980s, of which Jo was a board member for nearly 30 years. The couple was also proud to offer college scholarships to their McDonald's employees, a tradition they continued for nearly four decades. Jo passed away in 2015.