Why Did People Stop Using Beef Tallow? The McDonald's Story

If you are old enough to have eaten a McDonald's french fry in the 1980s, you already know the punchline of this article. They were better. Not nostalgia better — actually, measurably, chemically better, and there is a specific date when that stopped.

July 1990. That is when McDonald's stopped frying in beef tallow.

What McDonald's fried in before 1990

From the beginning, McDonald's fries went into a blend that was roughly 93 percent beef tallow and 7 percent cottonseed oil. Ray Kroc's operation standardized it, and for about thirty-five years it was the reason a McDonald's fry tasted like a McDonald's fry.

Beef fat does something to a potato that vegetable oil cannot. It browns harder, it crisps more aggressively, and it leaves behind a savory backbone that makes the fry taste like food rather than like salt on starch. Anyone who has eaten a fry from both eras can tell you this without knowing a single thing about smoke points.

What happened

In the late 1980s, a Nebraska businessman named Phil Sokolof took out full-page newspaper ads attacking fast food companies over saturated fat and cholesterol. Sokolof had survived a heart attack, and he spent millions of his own money on a campaign under the banner "The Poisoning of America." The Center for Science in the Public Interest ran a parallel push.

The pressure worked. In July 1990, McDonald's announced it was switching its fries to vegetable oil. Burger King and Wendy's followed. Within about a year, beef tallow had effectively disappeared from American fast food.

Here is the part that has aged badly. The vegetable oil that replaced tallow was partially hydrogenated — which meant it was full of trans fat. Trans fat turned out to be far more clearly harmful than the saturated fat it replaced, and in 2015 the FDA moved to eliminate partially hydrogenated oils from the food supply entirely, giving manufacturers until 2018 to comply.

So the industry replaced a traditional animal fat with an industrial fat, on health grounds, and the replacement was later banned by the FDA. The original fat was never banned.

Why this matters beyond fries

The 1990 switch was not really about one restaurant chain. It was the moment American commercial kitchens completed a transition that had been building for decades — away from animal fats that had been used since colonial times and toward industrially extracted seed oils.

That transition happened fast, it happened under public pressure, and the science underneath it has been re-litigated ever since. We go through what is actually established and what is still argued about in what are seed oils. The honest summary is that it is less settled than either side claims.

What we decided

We are a 1970s-themed garage in downtown Ocean Springs with roll-up doors, Golden Tee in the corner, and a Smokey and the Bandit mural on the wall. Cooking the way kitchens cooked before 1990 is on-brand to the point of being obligatory.

But the real reason is simpler: the food is better. Everything fried at The Garage comes out of beef tallow. No seed oils in the fryers, no seed oils anywhere else in the kitchen. Our fries, our house-cut chips, our tots, the Spam sticks, the catfish, the wings — all tallow.

The Ocean Springs Weekly Record described the result as "rich and flavorful without the heavy, greasy finish," which is the thing people notice first. Tallow-fried food does not sit on you the way oil-fried food does, because the fat is more stable at frying temperature and less of it soaks into the food.

You can cook this way at home

This is the part that used to be hard. Tallow came in a tub, solid, and you had to scoop it — which is why most people who tried it gave up after two uses.

Ours pours. Original Tallow Cooking Oil is the same fat our fryers run on, refined so it stays liquid and comes out of the can like any other cooking oil. One ingredient, roughly 400°F smoke point, no scooping.

If you want to taste the McDonald's-before-1990 thing specifically, make fries in it. We wrote out the method in beef tallow french fries, including the double-fry temperatures that actually matter.

The full tallow lineup includes a Rosemary Garlic version and gallon sizes for people who fry seriously.

If you are new to the fat itself, start with what beef tallow actually is — what it is rendered from, how it behaves, and why it went out of fashion in the first place.

Common questions

What oil does McDonald's use now?
A vegetable oil blend, primarily canola with corn and soybean oil, plus natural beef flavor added to approximate what was lost. In the United States that beef flavoring is derived from wheat and milk, which is why McDonald's fries are not vegetarian in the US.

When did McDonald's stop using beef tallow?
July 1990, following a public pressure campaign led by Phil Sokolof and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Why did people stop using tallow?
Public health messaging in the 1980s targeted saturated fat, and commercial kitchens switched to vegetable oils under that pressure. The partially hydrogenated oils that replaced tallow contained trans fat, which the FDA later removed from the food supply.

Did the fries actually taste different?
Yes. This is not purely nostalgia. Beef fat browns and crisps potatoes differently than vegetable oil and contributes savory flavor compounds that neutral oils do not have.