The Ridiculous Amount Of Beef McDonald's Goes Through In A Year

When you consider a mega-chain like McDonald's by the numbers, the data can be dizzying. With nearly 14,000 locations across the United States as of 2025, the company uses a truly unbelievable amount of its core ingredients, including potatoes, chicken, and of course, beef. As the star of the chain's legendary burgers, beef is especially important. In 2023 alone, McDonald's revealed that it purchased 714 million pounds of beef to keep up with demand. That's equivalent to approximately 2.86 billion quarter-pound patties (by pre-cooked weight), or 7.14 billion of the typical 1.6-ounce patties used for McDoubles, Big Macs, and other burgers. Put another way, that's 59.5 million pounds per month, or 1.96 million pounds every day.

Despite this substantial amount of meat, McDonald's sources much of its beef from just two suppliers: Oklahoma City's own Lopez Dorada and Keystone Foods based in Philadelphia. The company has used them for decades. Even more impressive, the chain fully switched to fresh beef for its Quarter Pounders in 2018, a move designed to create a juicier, more appealing burger.

It might be easy to assume that this high burger output requires unsavory cost-cutting measures. However, the truth about McDonald's meat is that the chain serves only 100% beef patties with no fillers or additives. We've seen no evidence that the beef contains unpleasant beef byproducts. The same goes for so-called "pink slime," an unappetizing term for lean beef trimmings treated with ammonia that were once a part of McDonald's beef.

Of course, serving food in such gargantuan quantities also leads to some surprising, if not unusual, dynamics. In the past, the company has confirmed that the meat in your burger could come from a massive amount of cows. It might originate from 100 or more different cattle. Other surprising McDonald's stats include the fact that the chain sells 3.6 billion servings of its iconic french fries every year (representing 2.6 billion pounds of potatoes and 255 billion individual fries), along with 133 million pounds of cheese on its various sandwiches.

Feeding the millions of people who patronize McDonald's every year isn't easy. It requires an almost unbelievable amount of food to ensure the popular McDonald's menu items remain in stock. Luckily, the Golden Arches seems up to the task, no matter how beefy customers' appetites may be.