The Impressive Way McDonald's Fries Are Cut To Perfection

You don't create the most iconic shoestring fries on the planet without shooting for the moon ... literally. When it comes to putting the "fast" in fast food, Mickey D's understands the assignment, and there may be no better example of this than the truly impressive way McDonald's cuts its fries: by shooting them through a cannon at 75 miles per hour, a land speed record that makes them the cheetahs of potatoes.

Far from the drive-thru, each washed and peeled spud gets the ride of its life at the factory as it's shot through a water tube at roughly 75 miles per hour, sliced midair by a grid of razor-sharp knives, washed in a lil dextrose, dropped into beef-flavored oil, flash frozen, shipped across the nation, fully fried in-store in canola oil, salted into oblivion, and snatched in the red box with the "M" on it (all so you can funnel fries into your mouth at zero miles per hour in rush hour traffic). Getting hungry just thinking about it? That'll be about $5 for a large. Bet you can eat them faster than the 18 minutes before McDonald's fries are inedible.

It's an efficient system for a chain that low-key fulfills an estimated 3.6 billion fry orders per year in the States. (Is there a national Nobel Prize for crushing 255 billion actual french fries?) Famously attributed to the Golden Arches, the phrase "Would you like fries with that?" — originally intended to drum up sales beyond basic burger and Coke combos — not only made fries McDonald's best-selling item on the menu, it made them the most popular fast food fries in the biz.

Back when fries bumped potato chips off the menu about a decade after McDonald's launched, the Golden Arches had yet to innovate the tech to treat its World Famous fries like merch launched out of a T-shirt cannon. Instead, semi-bespoke shoestring fries were cut by human hands.

These were the early days of the franchise, when you could look over the counter to find grandma in a rocking chair, lovingly frying and seasoning potato sticks with a twinkle in her eye. (Sort of.) According to one former 1960s-era staffer, the french fry routine was performed in-store, from start to finish, costing just 12 cents for a little salty paper sack of twice-fried spuds. Another Redditor recalled the original fry oil — known as Formula 47 and made of buttery, rendered beef tallow and a little vegetable oil — as being the key to that signature flavor, stating, "That is why the fries were so much better than whatever it is they call fries now." 

Of course, McDonald's fries changed forever when beef tallow was nixed in the '90s. Still, even when beef-flavored fries are coming in hot at 75 miles per hour, McDonald's delivers the taste of nostalgia, channeling their inner Dorothy when reminding us that, no matter where you go, their "World Famous Fries will always taste like home."