The 14 Biggest Scandals In McDonald's History

The following article discusses allegations of racism, homophobia, ableism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.

As businesses go, McDonald's has had its fair share of scandals, and that's hardly surprising. As one of the biggest of the many fast food chains in America, and arguably the most prominent, a lot of people have come to see it as signifying a lot of things that are wrong with the world. Cheap food made with questionable ingredients, unfair labor practices, discrimination, and its massive portions of unhealthy meals have all been identified over the last few decades as reasons to criticize McDonald's. Time and time again, this restaurant chain has had to fight off scandals associated with these issues, which have frequently resulted in litigation.

McDonald's has been largely protected from a lot of its scandals toppling it entirely, thanks to being a beloved brand that promises an affordable, all-American meal. With that said, though, there have been times when it's really messed things up. From using beef fat in food that it promises is vegetarian, to using tainted and out-of-date meat in its products, to allegedly mistreating workers who had to work wildly long shifts, McDonald's has gotten things very wrong in the past. Here, we're taking a deep dive into McDonald's history, to revisit some of the massive scandals it's had to deal with.

McDonald's has faced a large amount of criticism over how its workers are treated throughout the years, and in 2015 it found itself under significant fire after allegations of racial harassment. Ten ex-workers across three different stores in Virginia, managed by the same franchise owner, filed a lawsuit in which they stated that they were subject to racism, discrimination, and harassment. The lawsuit alleged that 15 African-American employees were fired without proper reasoning, and were replaced by white employees.

The lawsuit followed a direct complaint to McDonald's headquarters by ex-employee Katrina Stanfield after she faced racial discrimination while working, which she never heard back from. Although McDonald's branches are largely owned and operated by individual franchisees, it's difficult to separate them from the company itself, and it's arguable that McDonald's still governs and is ultimately responsible for each store's business practices. 

This wouldn't be the last time McDonald's would face legal action due to racial discrimination, either. In 2021, former professional baseball player Herb Washington sued the fast food chain, alleging that black owners of its stores weren't getting the same opportunities as white owners.

As of 2024, McDonald's employed approximately 150,000 people in the United States, over 135,000 people across the UK and Ireland, and many more around the world. Ensuring that each of these people is treated with the respect and care that they deserve is therefore a big job, and in the past, McDonald's has been repeatedly accused of not doing so. In 2025 this occurred yet again, when over 700 junior workers at McDonald's U.K. branches began legal action against the franchise, alleging that it was failing to uphold its duty of care to employees.

The workers said that they'd faced incidents of sexual harassment, bullying of employees with disabilities, and racist and homophobic abuse from branch managers. These claims came two years after McDonald's entered into an agreement with the U.K.'s Equality and Human Rights Commission (or EHRC) and committed to combat discrimination in its stores — an agreement that came after previous accusations that it had been handling complaints around sexual harassment poorly. In March 2025, the EHRC officially wrote to McDonald's to remind it of its vital responsibility to protect its workers from harassment and abuse.

With all the money that companies like McDonald's have, we really don't understand how they can get their advertising so wrong every now and again. The amount of fast food commercials that have totally flopped is pretty wild, and in 2019, yet another marketing moment was exposed as both badly executed and wildly inappropriate. McDonald's Portugal had decided to market its Halloween Sundae with the slogan "Sundae Bloody Sundae." While we get that it was trying to make its desserts appropriately spooky for the season, clearly nobody had remembered that the phrase Bloody Sunday is commonly used to refer to one of the darkest days in Northern Irish history, when soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march and killed 13 people.

Almost immediately, social media exploded with condemnation of the advert. McDonald's Portugal issued a hasty retraction of the Halloween Sundaes' advertising from its restaurants, and stated that it didn't intend to cause offense with the use of the slogan. There's an argument to be made that the phrase wouldn't carry the same weight in Portugal, but we live in a globally connected world here, people: There's no excuse.

You can't mention the words "McDonald's" and "scandal" in the same sentence without thinking about the hot coffee incident. This infamous moment in McDonald's history was one of the biggest P.R. headaches ever for the company, and ultimately led to a significant loss to both its reputation and its income. It all began in 1992, when 79-year-old Stella Liebeck spilled a scalding cup of McDonald's coffee onto her lap. Liebeck endured extensive third-degree burns, requiring skin grafts and years of recovery.

When Liebeck offered to settle the issue with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses, it refused and offered her a mere $800 in compensation. This clearly wasn't enough, and Liebeck took the case to the courts. This incident was largely reduced to a punchline in the media, but everyone got this infamous coffee story all wrong. During the trial, experts argued that McDonald's coffee was unreasonably hot, and the jury heard cases of other people being burned by its beverages. Ultimately, the jury decided that Liebeck was in the right, and she walked away with hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard-won compensation. 

What's in your Chicken McNuggets? If you assume it's pink slime, you may have fallen prey to one of the biggest hoaxes in McDonald's history, from which a large scandal stemmed that it had to deal with very publicly. When a picture began circulating online of a large pile of bright pink slime being piped out into a box, people quickly stated that the goo was actually the inside of Chicken McNuggets, and was a kind of ultra-processed meat paste. The noise got loud enough that it forced McDonald's to release an official statement, saying that "this image in connection with McDonald's is a myth. In fact, we don't know where it came from, but it's not our food."

McDonald's has also had to bat away accusations that it uses pink slime in its beef burgers. This rumor is slightly more believable, given that ground-up lean beef treated with ammonia is sometimes referred to as "pink slime," and is sometimes used as an additive or supplementary product in meat-based foods. McDonald's, however, doesn't use this in its burgers, and instead only uses 100% pure beef.

It's pretty amazing what a simple leaflet can do. This is something McDonald's found out from the mid-1980s onward, when it started dealing with what would then turn into one of the longest legal cases in British history. In 1986, leaflets made by London Greenpeace that boldly stated the issues with McDonald's treatment of animals and environmental practices, were distributed by the group. McDonald's took issue with the claims in the leaflet, and in 1990 served libel documents to five people in London Greenpeace, including activists David Morris and Helen Steel.

While the three other folks backed away from the challenge of fighting McDonald's, Morris and Steel did not. The two of them took on the case, despite having limited legal aid and barely any financial resources of their own, while McDonald's had the disposal of any lawyer it wanted and effectively infinite cash reserves. While a judge ultimately found Morris and Steel in the wrong and ordered them to pay McDonald's damages (which it didn't seek), the whole affair, dubbed the McLibel incident, put a massive dent in the company's reputation. 

Being caught lying to customers is one of the worst things that can happen to a company. That very situation occurred in 2001 in India, when McDonald's was forced to admit that it had been concealing the truth from its customers for a decade. Back in 1990, McDonald's had publicly stated that it was switching from using animal fat to vegetable fat to cook its fries. What it didn't say quite so publicly, though, was that a small amount of beef fat was still used to prepare the fries before they reached individual branches.

McDonald's had managed to get away with not admitting this to the wider world for over a decade, but when three Hindu businessmen filed a lawsuit against the company stating that it had been deceiving customers, it was forced to come clean. This McDonald's fries scandal created shockwaves both for vegetarians in India, which almost 40% of people in the country identify as, and for Hindus who avoid eating beef on religious grounds. McDonald's issued a public apology, but the damage was already done.

2004 was defined by a lot of things: George W. Bush was re-elected, Facebook was invented, and "Shrek 2" (also known as one of the best sequels of all time, in our opinion) was released. It was also the year that "Super Size Me" took the world by storm. This documentary by Morgan Spurlock sought to shine a light on the fast food industry in the United States, and how the portions and choices it offered could be responsible for rising obesity levels. To prove his point, Spurlock spent a month eating nothing but McDonald's and supersizing his meal whenever it was offered.

To say that this film had a big impact would be an understatement. It immediately shone a light on the potential health impact of eating high quantities of the kinds of food McDonald's sold, and ushered in conversations about the responsibility of fast food chains to protect public health. Six weeks after the film had premiered, McDonald's removed its supersize option from its menus. Spurlock later faced criticism of his own for the tone that the film struck, which has been perceived as both fatphobic and lacking in any real scientific rigor. 

If you had to work 25-hour shifts at your job, we'd imagine you'd be pretty upset, right? Well, that's exactly what guest workers at McDonald's branches in Pennsylvania claimed was happening in 2014. Workers who had been employed under a McDonald's franchise under a cultural exchange visa program went on strike after they claimed that they were facing repeated instances of abuse and poor treatment from franchisee Andy Cheung. Among other things, the workers stated that they had been asked to work shifts over a full day in length, given barely any hours despite being promised them, threatened with deportation, and offered cramped accommodation in their managers' basement.

Although the workers were nervous about taking action against Cheung, their strike action and picketing were ultimately effective. McDonald's stated that it was no longer working with Cheung, and eventually, the workers received over $200,000 in damages and back pay. This money didn't just go to the workers organizing the strikes, either, but to almost 300 employees who had faced poor treatment. Throughout this whole ordeal, McDonald's faced repeated negative publicity.

Sometimes, the scandals that companies face aren't a direct result of them doing something illicit or shady, but as a result of them not thinking everything through — and being played by outside parties. This occurred during the infamous McMillions scam, when one Jerome P. Jacobson managed to net over $24 million by ripping off a McDonald's Monopoly game and siphoning money to his nearest and dearest, who would then pass the winnings onto him.

The company that Jacobson was employed by, Simon Marketing, was responsible for making the game pieces used for McDonald's Monopoly, which gave players the chance to win up to $1 million with the purchase of a food item. Jacobson's position as director of security gave him the responsibility of ensuring no thefts occurred — but he soon decided to game the system, and figured out a way to give winning pieces to people recruited by friends and family. When these people "won" the winning tokens, Jacobson would take a share of the cash.

Jacobson's million-dollar McDonald's Monopoly scam went on for years until a tip to the FBI led to his arrest in 2001. He was eventually sentenced to several years in prison and ordered to pay millions in restitution. McDonald's faced a swift and brutal backlash from the public, and it all ended in lawsuits against Simon Marketing and a lot of embarrassment.

One of the biggest criticisms companies like McDonald's face is how much they pay their workers for their labor. Fast food franchises are notorious for trying to get away with paying as little as possible, and zero-hour contracts which exacerbate job insecurity. In 2012, this all came to a head when the Fight for $15 movement took off, after New York fast-food workers walked out en masse over poor pay. 

The workers said that companies like McDonald's had been getting away with underpaying them for too long — and those workers eventually saw their efforts pay off, with multiple states raising their minimum wage to $15 per hour, seeing billions of dollars in raises for fast food employees.

Unfortunately, though, the way that McDonald's reacted to the movement was pretty ugly, and caused it a lot of negative press. In 2019, McDonald's rolled out self-service kiosks in stores across the country, a move linked to the rising cost of employees. McDonald's was also exposed as having monitored activists and employees participating in the Fight for $15 movement, surveilling their social media as a way to keep tabs on them. 

If you were working for McDonald's in China in 2014, we're willing to bet that you had a pretty constant headache. The company's luck (and its profits) went south that year when a video made by a Shanghai-based reporter exposed practices in a food processing plant supplying McDonald's with products. The video showed workers processing meat that had fallen to the floor, stating that the meat was foul and past its prime, and using their bare hands to work with the food. A further investigation found that some of the meat's expiration dates had been extended beyond safe limits.

Unsurprisingly, people immediately stopped eating at McDonald's branches around China over fears that they could end up with contaminated food. Other fast food brands like Burger King, Papa John's, KFC, and Pizza Hut all worked with the supplier, and immediately severed business ties with it. McDonald's franchises in other countries, like Japan, were also affected, having used food from the same supplier.

Although McDonald's has been involved in plenty of scandals in its time, it's not directly responsible for all of them. In some cases, it's been dragged into unpleasant and disturbing scandals against its will. An example of this occurred in 2004, when high school senior Louise Ogborn, who was working in a Mount Washington, Kentucky McDonald's, was sexually assaulted and strip-searched. This unsettling incident began with a call to the Mount Washington branch, in which a man who called himself Officer Scott stated that an employee had stolen a purse, giving a physical description that matched Ogborn. The caller said that Ogborn needed to be strip-searched, with assistant manager Donna Jean Summers following his instructions. Summers then called her fiancé, who arrived at the store and continued to follow the caller's commands, resulting in Ogborn's abuse.

This disturbing incident resulted in prison guard David R. Stewart being accused of making the hoax call. Stewart was later acquitted of the charges made against him. Ogborn, meanwhile, won a verdict against McDonald's for over $6 million following the incident. Summer's fiancé was charged with and convicted of assault and sodomy, and sentenced to five years in prison.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

McDonald's has had a lot of mascots in its time: Ronald McDonald, the Hamburglar, and Grimace famously amongst them. However, if you don't remember one Mayor McCheese, it's because the fast food chain was pretty much forced to stop using it, following a plagiarism lawsuit that's one of those things McDonald's doesn't want you to know about. Mayor McCheese was rolled out in the 1970s as part of a vibrant cast of new mascots. Unfortunately, though, certain people immediately spotted the resemblance of the mayor to H.R. Pufnstuf, the character from the kids' TV show with the same name, made by Sid and Marty Krofft Television Productions Inc.

The production company swiftly sued McDonald's for copyright infringement, with the jury finding the fast food chain guilty of doing so. It was ordered to pay $50,000 in damages, but McDonald's appealed against the decision. The chain was unsuccessful — and was subsequently ordered to pay the production duo more than a million dollars. Pretty embarrassing, huh?