The Discontinued McDonald's Item That Forgot Hot Pockets Existed

On the whole, we're big fans of stuffed bread in all forms. Calzones or strombolis? Heck, yeah. Costco's chicken bake? Sign us up. We even go hard on stuffed bread's cousins, like empanadas, pigs in blankets, and hand pies. By far the superstar of this category, however, is the humble Hot Pocket. Two minutes in the microwave, and you have a molten-hot stuffer that will curb your snack attack. That's why it's so surprising to us that McDonald's once offered a very similar product to the Hot Pocket, but it was such a colossal failure that it reportedly fell off menus in less than a year.

McStuffins sounds like a hilarious moniker for a fast food item, but we have to admit that the idea has merit. Fresh-baked French bread was stuffed with one of four different fillings: Chicken teriyaki, Philly beef & cheese, pepperoni pizza, or BBQ chicken. The McStuffins appeared on the scene in 1993, and cost just $2. A vintage commercial shows customers practically knocking down the doors of their local Golden Arches to get their hands on one of these sandwich-roll up hybrids. 

Unfortunately, the reality was starkly different, and now the McStuffins have landed on the ignoble list of discontinued McDonald's products that we're glad disappeared. Why the schadenfreude? Just think about it: McDonald's baking bread every day? Sounds like a disaster.

Sometimes, new products crash and burn because they simply overlook the "fast" part of "fast food." Such was the case with McDonald's own discontinued disaster, the McPizza, which took a long time to prepare. Wendy's discontinued 2010s breakfast sandwich, the Mornin' Melt Panini, never made it out of the testing phase due to the need for fussy, time-consuming pressing with a panini griddle. Same story with Pizza Hut's deep-dish Priazzo, which needed an extended cook time. Panera, which even has the word "bread" on its signs, has stopped baking its own bread in-house and switched to outsourcing the loaves from offsite facilities. When viewed within the confines of fast food reality, McDonald's baking stuffed French bread loaves sounds downright ludicrous.

Folks generally don't eat at McDonald's because they are looking for bespoke fare; they hit that drive-thru because they want something tasty and fast. Ultimately, from our perspective, McStuffins were simply redundant. If you wanted a quick product like that, Hot Pockets existed. McDonald's attempted to squeeze into a niche that was already filled, and overcomplicated things by trifling with a product that had to be freshly baked. It's actually a wonder that McStuffins ever made it beyond the drawing board, because they were destined to fail. And good luck Googling this McFailure, because the name "McStuffins" has been co-opted by a bright-eyed animated Disney Junior child doctor. Talk about salting the earth!