As you take a bite of your favorite McDonald’s Big Mac, Quarter Pounder with Cheese, or McChicken, have you ever stopped to wonder where exactly the light, fluffy buns encasing your sandwich came from? Surprise: They’re not baked in the back of the restaurant where the burgers are flipped. Quite the contrary — McDonald’s sources its buns from several different bakeries around the country, depending on the region.
In 2019, Bakery & Snacks published news about the acquisition of Mid South — a supplier of buns to 3,500 McDonald’s restaurants across the U.S. — by CH Guenther & Sons, which also supplies baked goods to quick-service restaurants and grocers. The acquisition allowed CHG, a Texas-based supplier, to expand its reach to locations across the southern U.S. According to an article in Forbes published in January 2021, Cordia Harrington, a McDonald’s franchise owner and Texas native, has been a supplier of baked goods for over 1,500 customers daily for Pepperidge Farm, Five Guys, and McDonald’s, since the ’90s. When her company, Bakery Cos, opened its baking facility in 1991, she started supplying burger buns to McDonald’s as a way to combat the economic downturn.
In 2022, Black Enterprise published an article about the father daughter team — Trina Bediako and Tilmon F. Brown — who founded New Horizons Bakery out of Norwalk, Ohio to supply over 5,000 quick-service restaurants with burger buns, including McDonald’s. As a longtime client, McDonald’s relies on New Horizons for buns and English muffins, both of which are essential to its menu.
Dough conditioners give McDonald’s buns their consistent structure
While it’s entirely true that McDonald’s relies on local and regional bakeries to supply its thousands of franchise locations around the country, those bakeries are all using the same recipe. And they’re not secretive about the ingredients in that recipe, either. On the McDonald’s website, you can look up all the nutritional information for every item on the menu, from the bun on your Big Mac to the Big Mac sauce, and what’s in the lettuce and onions (spoiler: it’s just lettuce and onions, respectively). When it comes to the bun, the ingredients are fairly straightforward, but there’s one that does help to make those buns so consistent across the board, and that’s the use of dough conditioners.
Dough conditioners are ingredients added to bread to ensure consistency. Any ingredient introduced to a dough other than flour, yeast, and water, can be considered a dough conditioner. In the case of the McDonald’s bun, the ingredient list mentions enzymes and ascorbic acid as its dough conditioners. Ascorbic acid is sourced from citrus fruits and it also provides bread greater elasticity and a stronger gluten structure. Other dough conditioners include diastatic malt, lecithin, sodium stearoyl lactylate, sodium alginate, and amylase, many of which are available to purchase from retailers.
