Former McDonald’s Chef Reveals the Real Reason They Can’t Serve All-Day Breakfast

McDonald’s first introduced all-day breakfast in 2016, appeasing fans who for years had clamored to order an Egg McMuffin after 10:30 a.m. However, it didn’t last, and after being temporarily suspended in March 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, franchisees voted later that year to permanently remove all-day breakfast to provide “better speed of service and order accuracy.”

However, there’s also another reason for it involving fryer capacity that former McDonald’s corporate chef Mike Haracz explained in the latest video on his popular TikTok account.

Haracz was responding to a commenter who asked why the chain can’t cook French fries and hash browns at the same time when he brought up the bigger picture. “Well they tried all-day breakfast, but then they realized that the training, the amount of crew that they would have needed in the restaurant to successfully do that—it was way too difficult—you needed too many people,” he explained.

However, he said that the issue with fries and hash browns, specifically, is that both items are fried in the same fryer, and that there are different temperatures for the oil.

“It’s not drastic, you could do one or the other, but they would not be McDonald’s gold standard,” Haracz continued. “The other fact is that the heat lamps are the same heat lamps, so the amount of fries that usually take it up and the volume of fries, you would have less real estate because you also need to put hash browns in there.”

He also noted that fries are generally a little easier to work with since they’re put into a big basket and dropped in, whereas hash browns need to be cooked individually.