The Tex-Mex-Inspired Item McDonald's Gave Up On In The '90s

Even though the McDonald's we know is mostly just burgers, chicken, shakes, and the very best fast food fries, there were times when the company played with its menu in some pretty unexpected ways. While we've all pined for legendarily discontinued McDonald's menu items like the Cheddar Melt, there's one Tex-Mex-inspired handheld that people seem to have all-but-forgotten about. Yep, it was in a tortilla, and yes, it involved chicken, but it wasn't a variation on the tasty Snack Wraps.

McDonald's sold chicken fajitas, if you can believe it, for a short while in the 1990s. They contained grilled chicken, onions, green peppers, diced tomatoes, and cheese all rolled into a flour tortilla, and they came with packets of Picante Sauce (essentially salsa) on the side. These things were pretty small, too, sometimes sold for just $0.99 each, and they were advertised on television with songs featuring questionable Mexican-ish accents and sombreros. I was young then, but I do recall trying some, and they were fine, if relatively inoffensive (other than the fake accents in the commercials, at least). The fajitas were discontinued sometime later in the 1990s and haven't been seen since.

While there isn't a publicly disclosed reason for their discontinuation, McDonald's chicken fajitas were likely stopped for this main reason: lack of sales. In a nostalgic Reddit thread about the fajitas, a commenter said, "I actually worked at McDonald's during the last days of the chicken fajitas. No one would order them, so I would often have them for lunch. Normally I would have to pay half price for food, but my shift manager would let me have as many as I wanted without charging."

So it seems pretty safe to assume that folks just wanted their Big Macs and McNuggets instead, or maybe customers were looking for novelties like the 1992 McJordan Special, which was Michael Jordan's limited-time burger featuring bacon and barbecue sauce. That being said, McDonald's hasn't given up on Tex-Mex entirely — there's still one burrito on its menu. But the catch is, you can only get the McDonald's Sausage Burrito for breakfast.

If you really do want a tortilla-based item at McDonald's, there's always the Snack Wraps, though those are decidedly not Tex-Mex at all. If I had to hazard a guess, these fajitas won't ever be coming back, but remembering that they once existed will always be a fun tidbit for trivia.