When McDonald’s stops serving breakfast varies by location. In general, most privately owned fast-food restaurants stop serving breakfast at 10:30.
McDonald’s is the largest chain of fast food hamburger restaurants in the world. It was founded in 1940 by brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald. As of 2014, the company operates 35,000 franchised locations in 119 global locations that collectively serve 68 million customers daily. The McDonald’s menu consists primarily of hamburgers, soft drinks, milkshakes, chicken sandwiches, French fries, and breakfast items including breakfast plates and breakfast sandwiches. The company also sells fish sandwiches, wraps, salads and fresh fruit.
What Time Does McDonald’s Stop Serving Breakfast? – McDonald’s is slicing things from its menu to simplify life for employees working during the Covid-19 pandemic. I
Only the stopwatch counts. At McDonald’s everything is programmed, to the second. And whoever works there has to do nothing but follow very strict procedures to the letter. Welcome to the world of the “Modern Times” Charlots.
Eating in a McDonald’s restaurant is a matter of taste. Working with it, on the other hand, is all about numbers. Of times. Of Synchronizations. And, let those who worked on it for three years tell you, very, very concentrated. Just a handful of seconds too many, a moment of hesitation and the entire mechanism risks jamming. To give you an idea, two hundred and ten seconds must pass from when a customer gets in line to when he receives the tray with his order. Each till has a stopwatch that starts ticking as soon as you start typing your order on the screen. When the customer leaves with his tray, the clock stops. Two hundred and ten seconds, not a second more and possibly a few seconds less. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are, of course, exceptions.
The temperature of the fryers is two hundred and fifteen degrees. That of one hundred and eighty plates. Try your hand at it and you will experience what a lobster feels like when it is cooked alive.
The bread is toasted for thirty-five seconds. The toster is similar to the burger grill at late night stands. Only this is a timed machine with a buzzer that starts beeping as soon as it’s time to get the bread out.
The meat, on the other hand, is cooked in special automatic plates. Those same plates that stay at one hundred and eighty degrees for an average of sixty-three seconds. Each plate is adjusted according to the sandwich to compose. Next to the plates there are small chest freezers with meat for sandwiches inside. You take the meat from the well and put it on the griddle. Then you wait. You have to take the meat with gloves. Single use. The cooking time for the meat varies depending on the sandwich, because the size of the meat also varies depending on the sandwich.
The minimum temperature that freshly cooked meat must have is sixty-nine degrees. Every morning the manager on duty (one of those with white shirts that you find in every McDonald’s) checks the temperature of the first hamburgers. He stabs them with a sterilized tester and waits. If the temperature is right, the meat can be sold, otherwise it is thrown away. The plates are reset and more burgers are cooked. Continue like this until the right temperature is reached.
Above these plates are always the bacon trays. The bacon arrives in the kitchen already frozen and is left to thaw in the air. The defrosting time is more or less thirty minutes. The time within which you can eat it is four hours. The presence of bacon in the sandwich determines the absence of salt in the meat. Leftover bacon is thrown away. Everything that is thrown away is noted down on a sheet and, at the end of the day, efforts are made to ensure that the waste decreases the next day.
All sandwiches must be ready before the meat is cooked. If the customer wants to eat a cheeseburger, you can start cooking the meat at the same time you start toasting the bread. The bread is placed in the toster on a tray. Sixty-three seconds minus thirty-five is twenty-eight. In twenty-eight seconds you have to dress the bread on the tray with mustard, ketchup, dehydrated onion, cucumber and cheddar cheese; place the tray on the edge of the grill and wait for the meat to be ready; at the end of cooking, take the meat with the spatula and put it on the sandwich. Close the sandwich, wrap it and put it on the bin. The bin is like a dispenser. You put the sandwich on it and expect a cashier on the other side to take it and give it to the customer. Total time ninety seconds. Each sandwich can stay in the bin for ten minutes. Not one more, not one less. If within those ten minutes the sandwich is not sold, it is thrown away, because its taste will no longer be up to the standards set by McDonald’s. This applies to all foods used (lettuce, bacon, cheese, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, etc.).
Each food has its own “lifetime” and there are timers scattered throughout the kitchen that warn the crew (those guys in the orange polo shirts and hats) when it’s time to change a certain food. French fries, for example, must be sold within seven minutes of being drained from the fryers, otherwise they become inedible and McDonald’s doesn’t like this (and neither do customers). Each deadline is signaled by a beep, which is always different according to its function. There’s a beep for every griddle, one for every toster, one for every fryer; one that warns of deadlines, one that signals the arrival of a car at the McDrive. And there’s one who says it’s time to go wash your hands. Because it is mandatory to wash your hands (and forearms) every hour and, in any case, every time you touch your face/hair/clothes/etc., every time you come back from a break or change job, every time you leave or enter the kitchen. Mandatory. With bactericidal soap and water at a fixed temperature and very, very hot.
In the end, a McDonald’s kitchen works like an assembly line. Times are dictated by timers and beeps. Nothing is left to chance. Everyone knows what they have to do. All are coordinated. Everyone moves together. Like the gears of a clock, so to speak. The goal is: to serve customers as quickly as possible and with the best possible quality.
Everything is checked, inventoried and programmed. All. Thanks to a small computer program which, based on historical data on consumption and sales, provides an estimate of daily, weekly and monthly earnings and consumption. To this must be added the human, experiential contribution: nearby events, bad weather, student strike, public transport strike. All factors that can affect daily activity and that cannot be predicted by a computer.
The foods that are expected to be consumed within 24 hours are transferred every morning from a negative to a positive cold room and, within an hour, are taken to the kitchen.
Stop.
You need to know all this because it’s what many, mostly kids, do to get by. Six days a week for five hours a day. Thirty hours in all. Thirty hours a week for four weeks equals one hundred and twenty hours a month. For twelve months they make one thousand four hundred and forty hours a year. For three years they make four thousand three hundred and twenty hours. We work on Saturdays, we work on Sundays, we work on public holidays. It always works. Except for one day a week, on a lap, which is rest time.
In a McDonald’s kitchen, basically, it’s all about numbers, times, synchronizations. You need to have a good memory and maximum lucidity. And a well trained ear. Everything else comes later.
