You Can Thank This Small City In Pennsylvania For The McDonald's Big Mac

Travel about 45 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, and you'll arrive in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a small city of about 9,000. In 1754, a field about 10 miles outside of town became the site of the first battle in the French and Indian War at Fort Necessity. More than 200 years later, the city made history again, but this time for a very different reason. It's where the Big Mac was invented in 1967, and it changed everything.

Owner Ray Kroc realized McDonald's potential to expand significantly and spent the 1960s doing just that. In 1961, Kroc began the process of finding and training franchisees to run restaurants across the country. By 1965, McDonald's had gone public. In Uniontown, franchisee Jim Delligatti experimented with putting two patties on a stacked bun and topping it with lettuce, pickles, cheese, onions, and special sauce. Thus, the Big Mac was born — though McDonald's tested several other names before settling on the now-iconic moniker. Now, there's even a Big Mac Museum about 40 miles north of Uniontown.

How did Delligatti's creation become a national sensation? According to franchisees, McDonald's encouraged store owners to come up with new ideas for the menu. Former franchisee Jim Lewis told Restaurant Business, "I was a 30-year-old operator, and I could call the CEO and have a conversation with him because he knew who I was." McDonald's then tested ideas store owners came up with and, if they showed promise, they'd be rolled out across all restaurants.

The Big Mac isn't the sole product born out of this development process. McDonald's willingness to experiment with ideas created by franchisees led to a surprising amount of menu development within operators' stores rather than a corporate test kitchen. Take the Filet-O-Fish, which was the brainchild of Cincinnati franchisee Lou Groen. His store's sales slipped on Fridays during Lent, when Catholics avoided meat. After testing Groen's crispy seafood alternative, the Filet-O-Fish hit national menus in 1965.

In 1967, Hal Rosen, a McDonald's franchisee in Connecticut, wanted a unique green menu offering to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. He introduced a green-tinted, original milkshake flavor made from vanilla ice cream, lemon-lime sherbet, and vanilla syrup, calling it the Shamrock Shake. Three years later, when it expanded to all McDonald's locations, the new recipe dropped the sherbet and added green food coloring. It wasn't until 1983 that the shake incorporated its now-famous mint flavor.

Santa Barbara store owner Herb Peterson developed a new breakfast offering in 1971, eventually settling on egg, cheese, and Canadian bacon on an English muffin (he also tested a version of eggs Benedict that didn't make it). The item didn't have a name until Patty Turner, the wife of a McDonald's executive, coined the name Egg McMuffin. The breakfast sandwich spent a few years on the test market, and in 1975, it was served at McDonald's locations nationwide.