Packaging art and design can often be critical to the success or failure of a fast food product, and there are many cases where the burger boxes alone either helped or hinder a brand’s image.
The McDLT’s unusual patented design with a hot and cold section ultimately proved to be the sandwich’s undoing, as a mix of environmental concerns and unwieldiness made it less than ideal packaging for a burger meant to be eaten on the move.
However, the diametric opposite to this is a box design that was so positively received that it not only became massively successful but has a huge cultural footprint that can be felt to this day and created an effective monopoly via its packaging alone.
The Pursuit Of Happy Meals
The concept of a children’s fast food meal was nothing new. Most restaurants by the 1960s had some type of children’s menu or served half-portions of other menu items, and the innovative Burger Chef chain was the first to sell the “Funburger” and “Funmeal” in 1972.
Around the same time, Yolanda Ferdáne de Cofino, a businesswoman managing McDonald’s Guatemalan franchise from its inception in 1974 and was looking into ways to help mothers feed
their children.
Her answer was the Menú Ronald, a hamburger, small fries and a small sundae alongside a toy that was a more appropriate sized meal for children and less hassle to order.
At some point before 1977, this idea reached McDonald’s head offices in the United States, and Mrs Fernández de Cofino was told that her idea had a lot of promise and that she should present it to the World Franchisee Convention in 1977.
She eventually won a Ronald Award for the idea, and Mcdonald’s adopted the idea, sending the Ronald Menu concept to advertising executive Bob Bernstein.
Mr Bernstein agreed that a packaged meal would make it far easier for parents, but wanted to take the concept a step further and differentiate the children’s meal more definitively, rather than it being simply a miniaturised version of standard McDonald’s fare.
According to Mr Bernstein in a later recollection, he noticed his son looking at cereal boxes and realised that the packaging would be key, devising the idea for a lunch pail-shaped cardboard box with a handle shaped like the McDonald’s Golden Arches logo.
This was combined with art from children’s illustrators, games, comics, and other art with the relatively loose brief that the art appealed to children.
The initial Happy Meal consisted of a burger, small fries, a packet of biscuits and a toy, which initially was a choice between a stencil, a wallet, a bracelet, a spinning top, a toy lock or a rubber designed to look like a McDonaldland character of the era.
Quickly, however, the Happy Meal took off and much like the Funmeal before it became part of tie-ins for major television series and family films, the first of which being the Star Trek Meal to promote the first film in the Star Trek series in 1979.
Such was the importance of the box, that when Mr Bernstein was later honoured for his work at the annual marketing meeting for McDonald’s in 1987, he was gifted a replica made of gold, inscribed with a message of gratitude from the company.
