The Burger-Building Rule McDonald's Employees Have To Follow

From the highly ranked Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese to the humble hamburger, McDonald's has a step-by-step procedure for assembling each of its sandwiches. This ensures that customers across McDonald's more than 40,000 restaurants receive the same experience no matter which location they enter. And woe to the employee who takes them out of order. Following the specific steps for assembling a McDonald's burger may be one of the weirder rules that McDonald's workers have to follow. Each table where the sandwiches are assembled has a building guide posted above it for employees to follow.

As an example, every hamburger or cheeseburger starts with a split bun going through a conveyor toaster. The toasted bun is then laid out on the table on a wrapper or in its signature box. Mustard goes on first, dispensed on the inside of the top bun. Then comes ketchup, onions, sliced pickle, cheese for burgers with cheese, the meat patty, then finally the bottom bun. The sandwich is then wrapped, turned right side up, and slid on down the line.

Some customers take this uniformity of burger building very seriously, as one McDonald's employee shared on Reddit. "Someone got their sauce below the patty in the drive-thru whilst I was working in the front area. The customer came in and THREW it at my face in front of my manager because we made the burger incorrectly," they said. "That made my shift."

While dehydrated onions may be the secret ingredient to a McDonald's-worthy burger, proper burger-building technique cannot be ruled out. "It's really not that complicated," said one McDonald's employee on Reddit, adding, "you can learn it in a few days by practice." And if you forget, there is always the building guide posted at the assembly station as well as fellow employees to rely on.

More complicated burgers than a hamburger or cheeseburger, such as the Quarter Pounder and Big Mac, vary only slightly in their assembly. A Quarter Pounder gets an extra slice of cheese after placing the meat patty. The order for a Big Mac is sauce followed by onions and lettuce for the bottom and middle buns, pickles on the middle bun, cheese on the bottom bun, and a burger patty placed on each. The loaded middle bun is then carefully placed on top of the loaded bottom bun, and then the top bun goes over that.