Things You Didn't Know About McDonald's Coffee

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Coffee has been on the McDonald's menu since the restaurant's inception, and when a fast food giant has been slinging something for more than half a century, there's bound to be some fun facts, interesting history, and maybe even some scintillating gossip to be learned. Nobody can forget that infamous lawsuit, can they?

Once upon a time, a plain ol' cup of joe at the Mickey D's would run you 10 cents, and we can only assume it was something super tasty, like Maxwell House, that had been brewed many hours before. These days, you can often nab a McCafe coffee, made with 100 percent Arabica beans and freshly brewed every 30 minutes, for just a buck (depending on the current promotion). Not too bad of an inflation rate for 70-some years, eh? But while cheap is a fine attribute, what about its taste? Believe it or not, plenty of coffee lovers out there adore the drinks in the McDonald's McCafe lineup, and some even think they're better than Starbucks. Gasp. And the numbers don't lie — the McCafe brand is responsible for making the Golden Arches a shocking amount of money each year. How much? You'll have to read on to find out, along with all the other things you never knew about McDonald's coffee.

Once upon a time, McDonald's provided the cutest little spoons you ever did see to customers who wanted to stir cream and sugar into their coffee. No plain ol' wooden sticks or skinny straws here — these tiny plastic spoons even came topped with a miniature version of the iconic Golden Arches symbol. But this was in the '70s, and coffee wasn't the only stimulant in town. When the tiny plastic spoons got a reputation for doing more than stirring coffee, McDonald's had to make an executive decision. 

See, when your company's coffee stirrers become the drug user's paraphernalia of choice to snort cocaine, it's probably not the best look. And it's probably even worse when that dose of cocaine, packaged with a Golden Arches stirrer, gets dubbed a "McSpoon." That's a reason for a redesign if we ever heard one. According to Snopes, a spokesman for McDonald's said, "It has been brought to our attention that people are using them illegally and illicitly for purposes for which they are not intended," and eventually, the tiny spoon got replaced with a flat paddle — you know, one that couldn't be used so easily to snort things.

McDonald's introduction of the McCafe line of bougie coffee drinks in 2009 was a strategic move against a big competitor: Starbucks. The fancified espresso offerings were said to be a "game-changer at the time," and CBS News reported that a Deutsche Bank analyst downgraded Starbucks stock to "sell," and wrote in a memo to clients, "We expect McDonald's will extract a significant toll on Starbucks' performance, beginning this summer in earnest."

The company known for its Big Macs and Egg McMuffins reports that 16 percent of its sales per year, or $4 billion annually (as of 2016), are generated from the McCafe line, and while that sounds like a whole lot of money, it pales in comparison to Starbucks' 2018 estimated revenue of almost $25 billion. But experts still say that Mickey D's offerings should worry the coffee chain powerhouse, due to their significantly lower prices (with some drinks coming in about half the price) and the fact that the fast food chain continues to roll out new flavors and options similar to Starbucks. 

There's no way to know if Starbucks is truly worried about losing business from the Golden Arches, but if we were their competitors, half priced coffee plus the promise of a piping hot hash brown would worry us.

Drive-thru workers have to deal with their fair share of complaints from unhappy customers, but from time to time an unhappy customer ratchets things up a few notches, and suddenly the cup of hot coffee they were just handed becomes a deadly (or potentially dangerous, anyway) weapon. 

In 2019, 54-year-old Joseph DeLuca was indicted on two counts of second-degree felonious assault after he threw scalding hot McDonald's coffee at the drive-thru worker manning the window. DeLuca was erroneously given two cups of coffee instead of one, and when he was asked to show his receipt to confirm the purchase, he became enraged. He then whipped the entire tray, with both cups of coffee, back at the employee, who suffered first-degree burns on her neck, shoulder, and face — and of course, because it's 2019, the entire incident was caught on video. DeLuca faces up to 16 years in prison if charged with both counts.

As good as our intentions are, nine times out of 10 we roll up to the coffee shop without our reusable mug. And whether it's Starbucks or McDonald's, those disposable coffee cups (and to-go cups in general) we fall back on are generating a ton of waste. Christy Slay with The Sustainability Consortium says, "A recent report said that there are 600 billion cups — billion with a 'b' — that are produced and sold globally on an annual basis. So that's a lot."

McDonald's wants to do something about it though, and they've set two commendable goals for themselves by 2025: 100 percent of "guest packaging will come from renewable, recycled or certified sources," and "to recycle guest packaging in 100 percent of restaurants." To accomplish this, they've even partnered with competitor Starbucks — who estimate that they're responsible for about 6 billion of those cups per year — to get it done. 

The issue is that although these cups appear to be paper, there's a layer of plastic inside which renders them not only hard to recycle, but actually not compostable at all. So the two mega-chains have joined forces to offer a $1 million prize in the NextGen Consortium and Cup Challenge to whoever successfully "develops a fiber to-go cup and create a fully and widely recyclable and/or compostable cup." The jury's still out on this project, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction if they pull it off.