I don't really care about them as a food.

Well, I do some research.

"Only specially selected whole russet potatoes can make the world's most famous fries."

This is not how McDonald's fries won because they're crispy and salty.

This is how McDonald's won fries.

How can I prove  this to you? I could throw stats and polls at you, but I just want to show you all the times that Burger King has panicked.

2023. Uh, half onion rings, half fries. McDonald's is the same. 

Satisfries.

Shake em up fries.

New fry champion.  

There have been changes to the McDonald's fry, more on that later, but look at this ad from 1971. These are the same fries.

How did McDonald's become the definitive fry? How did they win?  

My research led me to a fry computer, a potato billionaire's mansion on a hill, and explained why McDonald's won fries.

"Chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of French fries (Phil's voice)."

Oh, that's right, we're dragging Breaking Bad into this, but I think that this metaphor is actually pretty key.

The fry at scale is better thought of as a  chemical caloric product than as a cooked  piece of food.

This isn't some fries  are addictive joke.

From the beginning, McDonald's made this food science.

Basic background: McDonald's was founded by Richard and Maurice McDonald in its burger incarnation in the 1950s in San Bernardino, California.

I've looked at tons of pictures of these  guys and I will not be able to tell them apart.

Just want to be transparent about  that.

A milkshake mixer salesman named Ray Kroc came in and invented the system that  helped McDonald's take over the world.

Now,   if you've seen the movie The Founder, you might have an idea of the McDonald brothers as these efficiency gourmands, and Kroc as a real estate operator.

"They're 5 percent too crisp."

But the history of the french fries shows that they were all single minded, food logistics obsessives.

In his memoir, Grinding It Out — best title for a memoir ever— Kroc wrote…let's change the music. 

"The French fry would become almost sacrosanct for me. Its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously."

So, come with me. Let's go ahead and make a McDonald's Brothers Checklist.

They stored Idaho potatoes in a chicken wire bin in their warehouse.

Potatoes got drained, rinsed, and fried in fresh fry-only oil.

The  fries were great, and brought people in at just 10 cents.

But that clip that I showed from The Founder, I think it kind of gives you the wrong  impression.

"They're 5 percent too crisp."

Because Kroc and the team he hired, they were huge fry nerds.

Kroc left the location in California, he goes back to Chicago to open up his first McDonald's in 1955.

He couldn't make the fries work, but this is key — he doesn't call, like, a chef to give him some help.

He contacted the experts at the Potato and Onion Association. He goes food science  mode.

I'm sorry, I have to put another clip here.

"This is art, Mr. White." "Actually, it's just basic chemistry, but thank you, Jesse."

The Association tells him, see, potatoes start off kind of sugary, and over time,  those sugars turn into starches.

Sugar browns more quickly, so if you don't cure the potato, let it turn starchy, the outside will cook too fast, and the inside won't get cooked.

The McDonald's brothers had kind of been curing their potatoes in those chicken wire storage bins.

Kroc crucially realized this, and he devised a curing system of his own.

This guy is a fry nerd. He also started  "the blanching process the potato people had recommended we try."

And in 1961, he started a lab — a food lab! — in nearby Addison, Illinois to study stuff like this.

It is  full of fry geeks.

They actually developed a computer to time French frying.

The old  system, where employees just kind of eyed the color of the fries, got replaced by an exact temperature cutoff.

But now it's time for a recurring segment that I like to call:

Meanwhile… At Burger King… 

Burger King franchise co-founder Jim McLamore recalled in his memoir that the Flame Broiler was a breakthrough for Insta Burger King. 

Ao, they started on that same efficiency technology path.

But their breakthrough really  was the Whopper, a relatively pricey big burger, 39 cents.

But it was a hit, and Burger King became the home of the Whopper.

McDonald's had perfected their own chemical caloric delivery product, and what do you do once you've perfected the manufacturing  process?

You work on getting better supplies. 

I drew a potato.

Here's a 1979 McDonald's ad. Aside from the weird phrasing, notice the focus on the russet burbank potato. 

By the 1960s, McDonald's started getting massive scale. That let them negotiate with suppliers.

The russet burbank was the dream. It was pretty long, which is obviously good for fries, and over time, it had a good starch sugar balance. 

But even once they identified the best potato, there were still lots of problems.

Potatoes were expensive to ship from Idaho.

Peeling   potatoes is hard and messy. And in summer, it was hard to keep them cool enough.

For months, McDonald's had to switch to  the inferior California white potato.   

I just pulled this up on my phone, and I am disgusted looking at it.

This is not russet burbank quality.

Enter an Idaho potato genius named J. R. Simplot. Okay.  

He is the subject of perhaps the weirdest biography that I now own.

Simplot pitched Kroc on frozen french fries. This was a product that he'd developed in the 1940s.

This solved the shipment, preservation, and consistency problems.

McDonald's had already  influenced russet potato growing patterns.  

Now it was going to change the market entirely. 

Simplot also promised to move potato curing out of primitive and subpar root cellars to  a big warehouse to help cure the potatoes.

"What is this?"

'Your new lab."

Listen, I could show way more clips than that, so be glad that I'm kind of restraining myself.  

McDonald's could deal with one big supplier for consistent russet burbank potatoes.

Simplot and McDonald's developed a patent process for preparing frozen french fry potato segments.

They're like pre-fried the fry before freezing to save flavor.

They were inventing incredible techniques to maintain purity.

Years later, abroad, like at the Moscow McDonald's, they showed the same obsession with supply.

Well, this potato, although it has an excellent taste, you cannot make french fries out of this.  

So we have to bring in our own variety and grow this type, this, this type of potatoes.

Meanwhile, at Burger King…

In 1967, Burger King sold to Pillsbury. This  hart shows the growth of McDonald's and Pillsbury.

You can see that Pillsbury doesn't push on the gas like McDonald's, so it's hard for them to push suppliers. 

McDonald's just focused on honing its fancy longs.

I want to show you a hill.

This hill overlooks all of Boise, and if you go back in time, it used to house the Simplot mansion.

You could say that J. R. Simplot won fries.

I mean, his company supplies most big fry makers with frozen fries today. If they don't,  then somebody else freezes them.

So I don't want to act like McDonald's had an insurmountable lead here just because of the technology.

In 1972, at a potato conference, Pillsbury said that Burger King was a major user of frozen french fries.

And in his memoir, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas says that everybody kind of learned the McDonald's  fry secrets.

But the short life of BK's Satisfries makes it clear that Burger  King has the soul of a marketing company.

McDonald's was, from founding, to the Kroc era, to today, a food logistics system that wanted to be the same, coast to coast.

Their fries may not be the best, but because of their obsession  with preparation, with sourcing,  with manufacturing, their fries definitely  are the most.

They're the ones that won. 

"I am the one who knocks."

Hey everybody, that's it for this one. Thank you  for watching.

I did not get into the beef  tallow controversy in this video.

In 1990, McDonald's switched from using beef tallow to using vegetable oil and people claimed that it changed the taste of the fries to a great  degree.

That may well be true, but you know, again, like I said at the beginning,  this video isn't really about the taste.

It's about the fries as this  calorie technology, and uh,  that was my focus.

Lot of books that I read for  this. Top book is probably "Behind the Arches."

That's the one if you really want to nerd out  on all things McDonald's, and see that this  relentless focus on efficiency, uh, happened  for all different food types, not just fries.

Uh, but there's also links below to the  other books that I read for this.  

There will be a reaction video up on Patreon,  so please go check that out.

We kind of talk about things there, and I tell  you stuff behind the scenes of the  video that you might not otherwise know. 

And that's pretty much it for this one. Thank you for watching, and I will see  you in the next one.

I have some fries to,  to thaw out. I have no idea how I'm gonna,  how I'm gonna do that and not make a huge  mess.

All right. See you in the next one.