McDonald's Egg McMuffin Was Changed For The Better By A Simple Ingredient Swap

If asked to name a fast food breakfast item off the top of your head, what would you say? Many people would first think of the Egg McMuffin. The now-ubiquitous McDonald's breakfast sandwich was introduced in 1972 and rolled out nationwide in 1976.Consisting of an egg, a slice of Canadian bacon, and American cheese on a toasted English muffin, the Egg McMuffin quickly became a staple of the McDonald's breakfast menu at a time when it was otherwise not always easy to get breakfast on the go. 

For most of the Egg McMuffin's existence, the English muffin was brushed with margarine before the other ingredients were layered on. In 2015, McDonald's changed a key ingredient: it swapped margarine for butter. In addition to using margarine on the English muffin, it had also used this fat for frying eggs and other breakfast foods on the griddle. This represented a big change, as butter has long been more expensive than margarine. For a massive fast food company, this kind of cost increase was significant but made a major difference for the better when it came to taste and customer satisfaction.

So why the switch? McDonald's sales in early 2015 were down significantly from previous years, and the company was determined to make some changes in an effort to please customers. In addition to the butter swap, 2015 was also the year that McDonald's instituted all-day breakfast, which was indeed a wildly popular move. It didn't take long for the company to see that it was on the right track: McDonald's global comparable store sales increased by 4% in the third quarter of 2015.

Not long later, the company also changed the flour it used for its English muffins, switching to unbleached instead of bleached flour. Some McDonald's franchise owners said that customers preferred the new flavor as well as the new texture, finding it crispier than its predecessor. The data also bore this out, as in the first quarter of 2016, same-store sales at McDonald's increased by 6.2% globally. The chain gained 23 million customers compared to the same period in the previous year. This was the largest increase the company had seen in four years.

In 2025, McDonald's still uses real butter on the Egg McMuffin, suggesting that the switch really did make a long-term difference in popularity. It's likely that most people think butter, which is denser and has a richer flavor, just tastes better than margarine (although there is plenty of variation in quality amongst butter brands). At the very least, most people agree that it has improved the Egg McMuffin. McDonald's appears to still prioritize listening to its customers, as when it brought back the Snack Wrap in 2025 by popular demand.