Toronto chef spends 2 years creating McDonald’s newest burger

A Toronto chef has been fine-tuning McDonald’s Chicken Big Mac for two years leading up to its upcoming national launch on Tuesday.

“I remember taking a bite of it and thinking, ‘Wow, this is a Big Mac but it's a little bit different,” Jeff Anderson, McDonald's senior manager of menu innovation in Toronto, told CTV News Toronto.

Naturally, the foundational features of the sandwich were locked in at an early stage – the notorious Big Mac sauce, toasted sesame seed bun, tangy pickles and a slice of processed cheese.

“We knew we had to keep the identity, but how do we integrate the chicken part of it into that? It is a lot of pre-work that comes into this before we make something that goes to market,” Anderson said.

At the corporation’s headquarters in Toronto, he dove into recipe development daily – the nuances of cook time, the composition of building the sandwich and evaluating how the ingredients fit together.

“I mean part of our job is just testing and eating quite a bit … pretty much every day we're in the kitchen testing, trying new things,” Anderson said.

Before joining McDonald’s, he was trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of Canada and worked at restaurants in Toronto and Halifax.

“Then I kind of took a different role as an unconventional chef in this food product development, kind of science meets food development. So that's kind of how I got to where I am,” he said.

The inspiration for swapping beef to chicken actually came from customers who have been “hacking” the Chicken Big Mac for years, as Anderson put it. They were either taking the crispy chicken out of another sandwich – say, the chicken snack wrap – and placing it in the Big Mac or in reverse, taking the special sauce and smearing it on a chicken sandwich.

A year ago, the Chicken Big Mac launched in the United Kingdom and sold out in less than two weeks before testing the waters in the United States over the summer.

As for whether the results will be as positive in Canada, time will tell next week when the new menu item launches for a limited time.

“We are excited to hear their feedback. I think it's a winner,” Anderson said.