McDonald’s has decided to bring back its infamous Szechuan sauce, this time hoping to avoid a massive fiasco that caught employees off guard.
Last year, the TV show Rick and Morty featured a joke concerning McDonald’s limited edition Szechuan sauce, released alongside the 1998 Disney movie Mulan.
As a result, thousands of fans signed a petition demanding the fast food chain bring back the sauce, McDonald’s eventually giving into demand and releasing a batch.
Szechuan Sauce is a Chicken McNuggets condiment.
On June 19th, 1998, The Walt Disney Company released their animated feature film Mulan, the story of a brave daughter who posed as a man and enrolled into the Chinese military to take her wounded father’s place in the fight against the Hun invasion. To coincide with the upcoming Disney film, McDonald’s released a new limited-time condiment, the Szechuan teriyaki dipping sauce. It was created to mimic traditional Chinese Szechuan Sauce, and it came complete with Happy Meal Chicken McNuggets and one out of a set of eight Mulan toys. After the promotion of the film, the sauce was removed from all McDonald’s restaurants. Contrary to popular belief, Genuine 1998 SzeChuan dipping sauce’s plastic cover is purple & white, not red. The red dipping sauce was a photoshop combination of 2011 BBQ sauce among other things.
McDonald’s released a “limited” number of packets on the 7 October, but not nearly enough for the legions of fans who arrived at restaurants, police being called to some as outrage spread.
Sources began showing a few days prior early releases of the sauce on YouTube and teasing a collectable poster to commemorate the event. To the dismay of their ‘billions and billions served’, the restaurants distributed roughly 20 Szechuan sauce packets at select restaurants, and 10 of the posters. Predictably, scalpers stood in line for hours just so they could obtain the extremely rare sauce and sell it for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
Many took to corporate in search for an answer, overwhelming the phone lines and resulting in hundreds being turned away with no response.
One Rick & Morty fan posted on Twitter, “This kind of marketing promotion is the reason Jerry is unemployed.”
At one McDonalds restaurant in Los Angeles, a man was stabbed in the middle of a long line during the distribution of it.
On February 22nd, 2018, McDonald’s announced on Twitter[1] that it would bring Szechuan Sauce for a wider period of time and a larger quantity, as 20 million cups of the sauce will be available starting on February 26th, 2018.