FOOD
Why doesn’t McDonald’s call its drinks ‘milkshakes’ and calls them ‘shakes’?
The world’s largest fast food joint is well-known for its rotating selection of shakes but there is an important reason these are not ‘milk’shakes.
2023 was a particularly big year for McDonald’s drinks. Specifically, the Grimace Shake dominated social media in the summer. The #GrimaceShake was huge on TikTok due to a combination of the internet’s creativity and the odd colour of the purple drink.
McDonald’s is very careful about how it describes drinks like the Grimace shake. Take a look next time you visit on how it names any similar drinks and you will notice they are not called milkshakes. The word milk is entirely absent. Do they actually contain no milk?
Amongst the frequestly asked questions section of the McDonald’s website, there is an answer to this very query.
“Our shakes contain milk from our reduced-fat soft serve, which makes them thick and creamy. Dairy regulations actually vary from state to state on what can officially be called a ‘milkshake.’ We like to keep it simple and refer to them strictly as ‘shakes.’”
Other fast food naming peculiarities
This wouldn’t be the first time fast food companies have had to change naming conventions. There was a judgment related to the bread used in Subway sandwiches, centering around the presence of high levels of sugar in the bread dough.
In Ireland, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the bread used in Subway sandwiches could not be legally defined as “bread” for tax purposes because it contained too much sugar. The ruling was based on the country’s Value Added Tax (VAT) Act, which exempts staple food items like bread from taxation.