--- title: "McDonald’s tested a fried roast beef sandwich in 1968, then dropped it over the cost of beef slicers" url: https://badiyaa.com/mcdonalds-1968-roast-beef-sandwich-history/ published: 2026-11-03T08:28:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-03T08:28:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # McDonald’s tested a fried roast beef sandwich in 1968, then dropped it over the cost of beef slicers Six years after Lou Groen's Filet-O-Fish beat Ray Kroc's pineapple Hula Burger in Cincinnati, the chain tried sliced beef for adults. The record, plus a timeline of its other lost 1960s and 1970s items. Six years after a Cincinnati franchisee rescued his Friday trade with a fried fish sandwich, McDonald’s tried to repeat the trick with sliced roast beef. The year was 1968, the target was grown-ups, and the sandwich was gone almost before anyone noticed. That forgotten item is circulating again this week as food writers dig through the chain’s back catalog. The record behind it is thinner than the Filet-O-Fish legend, but it is there, and it says something about how McDonald’s decided what stayed on the menu in its first decade under Ray Kroc. ## The fish came first Lou Groen ran a McDonald’s at 5425 West North Bend Road in Monfort Heights, a heavily Catholic suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1962 his Friday hamburger sales were collapsing because Catholics at the time abstained from meat every Friday of the year, not only in Lent. His answer was a breaded fish fillet on a steamed bun with tartar sauce and half a slice of cheese. Kroc, who had bought the company in 1961, had his own meatless idea: the Hula Burger, a slice of grilled pineapple with cheese on a cold bun. The two sandwiches went head to head in a one-day sales contest, with the winner earning a permanent place on the menu. Accounts differ on the date: some put it on Good Friday 1962, others in 1963. One account of the day’s tally has 350 fish sandwiches sold against six Hula Burgers. It spread through the chain during 1963 and reached every US location by 1965, becoming the first non-hamburger item Kroc had ever added. ## Then came the roast beef The Fried Roast Beef Sandwich arrived in 1968, pitched at adult customers rather than families. It came with a packet of McDonald’s barbecue sauce on the side and rode the slogan “McDonald’s is my kind of place.” The idea traced back to a franchisee who had copied the roast beef sandwich sold by rival chain Arby’s. The problem was not taste but hardware. Roast beef has to be sliced, and slicers cost money that a hamburger-only kitchen had never needed. The company concluded that the sandwich could never turn a profit no matter how many it sold, and it was dropped. Unlike the Filet-O-Fish, it never earned the national rollout, and no exact end date for the test survives in the open record. Why does one sandwich become a 60-year fixture and the other a footnote? The fish solved a problem franchisees already had, and it used the fryers that were already in every store. The roast beef created a new problem and asked owners to pay for new equipment to solve it. By 1968 McDonald’s had also found a far cheaper way to court adults: the Big Mac, introduced in 1967, used the same patties and buns the kitchens already stocked. ## Badiyaa timeline: what McDonald’s launched and lost, 1962 to 1979 Here is how the roast beef experiment fits among the other items the chain tried and abandoned in its first two decades under Kroc, built from the chain’s product history and the dates each source confirms: - **1962:** Lou Groen invents the Filet-O-Fish in Cincinnati. - **1962 or 1963:** Hula Burger loses its one-day sales contest to the fish sandwich and is retired. - **1965:** Filet-O-Fish reaches the full US menu. - **1967:** Big Mac debuts. - **1968:** Fried Roast Beef Sandwich tested for adults, then dropped over slicer costs. - **1970:** McSpaghetti first appears in the US; it later vanishes stateside but survives in the Philippines. - **1971:** Quarter Pounder created by franchisee Al Bernardin in Fremont, California. - **1978 to 1979:** Onion Nuggets sold in select US markets, a concept later reworked into Chicken McNuggets. - **Late 1970s:** McRib and personal pizzas tested near interstate highways around Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. The pattern across the list is consistent. Items that reused existing fryers and grills, like the fish, the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder, lasted. Items that needed new tools, from beef slicers to pizza ovens, did not. The Filet-O-Fish itself was pulled from US menus on September 26, 1996, in favor of a Fish Filet Deluxe, and was brought back from mid-1997 after customers sent letters and petitions. As of May 2020 the US version is made from Alaska pollock, and sales still climb every March when Lent begins. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Filet-O-Fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filet-O-Fish) - [Wikipedia: List of McDonald's products](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_McDonald%27s_products) *Image: Cboyles4423, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*