Fast Food's Greatest Failures
Fast food runs on a narrow promise: the same thing, quickly, for not much money. Every so often a chain gets restless and tries to be something else. A pizzeria. A buffet. A diet counter. A place for adults. The twelve items here are what happened when McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Dairy Queen and Burger King stepped off the script, and seven of them came from McDonald's alone, which says something about how much room McDonald's had to experiment.
They did not all fail the same way, and not all of them were flops. Some lost to the customer, plainly and measurably. Others lasted for years and lost to the kitchen instead: a box the public turned against, an oven that took too long, a buffet somebody had to keep restocking. Arranged in the order they arrived, from a 1962 Lenten experiment to a 2013 french fry, they make a fair map of what a drive-thru can and cannot carry.
Hula Burger
Ray Kroc wanted a meatless Friday option, and he wanted it to be his. When Lou Groen, who ran the McDonald's in Cincinnati's Monfort Heights, pitched a fish sandwich for Catholic customers in 1962, Kroc agreed to test it only against his own idea: grilled pineapple and cheese on a bun. Good Friday settled it, 350 sandwiches to six. Kroc paid Fred Turner the suit he had wagered, and the fish became the first new item on the permanent national menu in 1965. This failure, at least, was simple. People did not want it.
McDLT
The McDLT solved a real problem with a bulky foam box. Its two compartments kept the hot patty away from the cold lettuce and tomato until the customer put them together, and it went national in 1985, backed by a commercial with a singing, pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander. Then the box became the problem. It drew environmental criticism, and on November 1, 1990, McDonald's announced it would phase foam out of its US restaurants. Paper wrapping could not do the same job. By early 1991 the sandwich was gone, its slot handed to the McLean Deluxe.
Priazzo
Pizza Hut spent about two years developing the Priazzo and $15 million launching it in June 1985, in Roma, Milano and Florentine versions. The company insisted it was not a pizza but a double-crusted Italian pie, and hoped it would follow the lunchtime success of the Personal Pan Pizza. For a while it worked: PepsiCo's 1986 report of a 12 percent rise in Pizza Hut revenue was helped in part by the Priazzo. Then curiosity wore off, regulars drifted back to ordinary pizza, and former employees remember thick pies that were slow to make. It was fading by about 1991.
Super Size
By most accounts Super Size began in the summer of 1987 as a seasonal promotion of bigger fries and drinks. It outlived the season: McDonald's claimed first use of the Super Size name in January 1993 and trademarked it. At the end, fries came in a 7-ounce carton and drinks in 42 ounces. In March 2004 the company confirmed it was phasing both out, six weeks after Super Size Me premiered. A spokesman said the film had nothing to do with it. The stated reason was menu simplification, and he added that not very many Super Size fries were sold.
SuperBar
For $2.99 in most areas, the SuperBar turned a Wendy's into an all-you-can-eat buffet with three stations: the Garden Spot for salad and fruit, Mexican Fiesta for taco fixings and Pasta Pasta for Italian dishes. It was a great deal of food for the money and a great deal of work for the crew, who had to keep a buffet stocked and clean while also running a burger counter. In 1989 analysts said the "super bars" had only muddled the chain's identity during a sales slump. Even so, it lasted about a decade before Wendy's phased it out in 1998.
McPizza
McDonald's tried a deep-fried pocket pizza in Philadelphia in 1985, then got serious in 1989 with a 14-inch family pie tested around Evansville, Indiana and Owensboro, Kentucky. By the early 1990s some estimates put pizza in close to 40 percent of US restaurants. Its problem was not reach but speed. A large pie initially took about 11 minutes in its special oven, and McDonald's Canada later pointed to that wait. By about 2000 it was nearly gone, though two holdouts in West Virginia and Ohio kept baking until August 2017.
Breeze
The Breeze was the Blizzard rethought for the lower-fat years, with candy and cookie mix-ins blended into frozen yogurt instead of soft serve. Most accounts date its rollout to 1990. The trouble was in the freezer. Stores had to keep a second frozen base on hand for a treat few customers ordered, and Dairy Queen's explanation, as reported in 2013, was that demand was so low the yogurt often spoiled before it could be sold. The chain dropped the Breeze around 2000, never replaced it with another frozen yogurt treat, and let the trademark lapse.
McLean Deluxe
McDonald's launched the McLean Deluxe in 1991 after only four months of restaurant testing. The patty, out of Auburn University research, was about 90 percent beef, 9 percent seasoned water and 1 percent carrageenan, a seaweed extract that bound the water in. Hardee's ran ads promising its own lean burger would never contain a seaweed additive. By 1993 analysts put McLean sales under 2 percent, and at one downtown Chicago McDonald's it cost more than a Big Mac. It was dropped in February 1996, and a food consultant put the reason bluntly: customers said it did not taste good.
Bigfoot Pizza
Bigfoot was Pizza Hut's entry in the early-1990s value fight with Little Caesars and Domino's, whose Dominator covered 300 square inches. Pizza Hut answered with two square feet cut into 21 slices, $10.99 with up to three toppings, and a marketing executive told the Christian Science Monitor in 1993 that the chain had not been in the value market until that year. The launch had rotten luck: on July 4, 1993, the promotional blimp crash-landed on a Manhattan roof. Bigfoot faded around 1995, when Stuffed Crust arrived, and was less killed than replaced.
Arch Deluxe
The Arch Deluxe was McDonald's bid for adults, launched on May 9, 1996, as its first "grownup taste" sandwich and backed by a campaign Fortune estimated at $200 million. Company officials had talked about a $1 billion brand in its first year. Instead, the Deluxe sandwiches cost about 20 percent more than the classics, and by late September a Colorado franchisee said customers were ordering Quarter Pounders and Big Macs about twice as often. It faded from more locations through 1998 and 1999 and was dropped in 2000. The grown-ups, it turned out, already had a McDonald's order.
McSalad Shakers
McSalad Shakers put a salad in a tall clear cup with a domed lid: pour in the dressing, shake, eat. They went national in April 2000 in Chef, Garden and Grilled Chicken Caesar versions. This is the gentlest case in the collection, because McDonald's was not giving up on salads. In March 2003 it replaced the cups with bowl-style Premium Salads and Newman's Own dressings, a line that passed 200 million US sales in its first year. The cup lost to a bowl, not to indifference. Salads themselves left US menus in 2020.
Satisfries
Burger King launched Satisfries on September 24, 2013, with a batter that absorbed less oil in the fryer and cut calories by about 20 percent: 270 for a small against 340 for regular fries. They also cost more: a small carried a suggested $1.89, 30 cents more than the regular kind, and sales never justified them. In mid-August 2014 Burger King let North American franchisees keep them only where they sold well, and about 2,500 of roughly 7,400 US and Canadian restaurants did. Less than a year after launch, about two-thirds of the chain had voted with its fryers.
Sort the causes and a pattern shows. Only a few of these died simply because people did not like them: the Hula Burger lost 350 to six, the McLean never cleared 2 percent of sales, and Satisfries survived in only about a third of Burger King's restaurants. At least four were undone mainly by the operation itself: a foam box for the McDLT, an 11-minute oven for McPizza, a buffet the crews had to keep stocked for the SuperBar, and a simpler menu for Super Size. The Breeze's second frozen base and the Priazzo's slow-to-make pies were burdens too. Three, the McLean, the Breeze and Satisfries, were pitched at the diet-conscious, and the longest-lived of them lasted about ten years.
Elsewhere the old favorites simply won: Quarter Pounders and Big Macs beat the Arch Deluxe, and ordinary pizza beat the Priazzo. Not every loss was a waste, either. The Filet-O-Fish earned its place by beating the Hula Burger, Stuffed Crust took Bigfoot's place, and Premium Salads replaced the shaker cups.
Updated Nov 1, 2026