How McDonald's Tried (And Failed) To Top Arby's With Its '60s Roast Beef Sandwich

In 1967, a Cleveland-area McDonald's franchisee, Nick Karos, who with his brother, Gus, had four of the fast food restaurants, noticed a newer chain was doing well with its roast beef sandwiches. He suspected that this chain, Arby's, could cut into the Karos' burger business, and he decided to fight back with his own version of a roast beef sandwich. Arby's had been started three years earlier by brothers Leroy and Forrest Raffel in Boardman, Ohio, expanded quickly, and by 1966 had begun moving into the Cleveland area, starting with three locations.

Nick Karos went to McDonald's president Fred Turner with his idea, which was shot down. He had been with the McDonald's Corp since 1958 and was the 10th employee hired by Ray Kroc, who'd masterminded the exponential growth of the burger company. Nick Karos had pull. He started the company's Hamburger University six years earlier to teach franchisees and managers the ropes. He went to Kroc and got the green light for his roast beef idea.

The McDonald's roast beef sandwich was introduced in October 1967 and the sandwich was an immediate hit. But taking the sandwich from Cleveland to the rest of the country would turn out to be more than a little complicated, leading to the sandwich's demise, where it would join the ranks of other McDonald's menu items that have been scrapped over the years.

Scaling the sandwich Nick Karos was making in Cleveland, using baked roast beef to the rest of McDonald's 1,000 locations was a challenge. McDonald's created a device, the Tepidarium, that deep-fried the beef, along with various techniques for heating the meat in-store that resulted in a dry and bland end product. "The sandwich was an acquired taste," the late Holly Moore, who worked on the project for McDonald's, told the Retroist in 2014.

The sandwich went into other locations and McDonald's invested money in the technologies and equipment to get the sandwich to market. Then, before going national, it was discovered they'd been relying on flawed data, and the sandwich wasn't financially feasible. The project was scrapped. Ray Kroc, in his memoir "Grinding It Out," admitted they'd made missteps. "We were pretty excited about it at first. But roast beef is difficult for our kind of operation to deal with," he wrote. "It went well in a few stores, but it simply did not adapt to our system." Kroc put a positive spin on the incident by saying the company learned valuable lessons that offset the cost of the fiasco.

While Nick Karos' idea was a bust, he and Gus Karos would later be responsible for another (defunct) McDonald's sandwich, the McDLT. Although roast beef was an expensive misstep for the burger chain, it was certainly not one of the worst mistakes McDonald's has ever made. But Arby's had won the roast beef war.