McDonald's Pancakes Come From A Southern Family-Run Facility

When you think of what it takes to make pancakes, your mental image may be no more complicated than batter being poured onto a hot griddle. For fast food empire McDonald's, however, making the chain's signature hotcakes and supplying them to over 44,000 McDonald's locations worldwide is a more elaborate endeavor. That's why the responsibility falls to Bama Companies, a family-run Southern food concern founded in Texas and today operating out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Bama Pie Company, as it then was, had its origins in the 1920s. Cornelia Alabama Marshall — fondly referred to by the company named for her as "Grandma Bama" — achieved local success in Dallas, Texas, cooking sweet potato pies that she would sell at the local drugstore. When the advent of the Great Depression rendered her husband unemployed, Marshall began selling smaller pies door-to-door to support their seven children.

After gaining first-hand insight into the pie business while working as his parents' delivery driver, Paul Marshall moved to Tulsa with his wife, Lilah, and opened a new branch of the company. After World War II, the younger Marshall observed the increasing prevalence of folks eating in their cars and determined they should have a pie to fit this need. "[Grandma Bama] thought he was crazy," recalled current Bama CEO (and Paul's daughter) Paula Marshall in a YouTube interview with the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, but the idea convinced Ray Kroc. By 1965, the Bama Pie Company became a key supplier of McDonald's fried fruit pies.

After her father suffered a heart attack in 1989, Marshall took over as CEO. After resisting pressure from McDonald's to sell the company, she continued the (fried) fruitful relationship her father had cultivated with the mega-chain. In the mid-1990s, McDonald's asked Bama to be part of its breakfast menu. "I really felt strongly that it was something we needed to get involved in, but my parents weren't excited about taking on that much debt," she told CEO Magazine in 2021. "Nevertheless, they backed me."

Bama's move into breakfast foods would presage further expansion. 2026 marks the ten-year anniversary of Bama's announcement that it would begin producing hotcakes for McDonald's, a deal which necessitated a new, purpose-built 50,000 square foot Tulsa facility. The following year, Bama celebrated its 80^th anniversary, and the new plant would produce one million hotcakes per day for McDonald's restaurants around the world. Served with maple-flavored syrup and whipped, salted butter, McDonald's hotcakes may not be the most famous item on their breakfast menu, but they certainly pass the taste test.

When ranking all McDonald's breakfast items, we judged the hotcakes as "a surprisingly satisfying substitute" for a homemade pancake breakfast, noting that their fluffy and tender texture contained "just enough sweetness to stand on their own. If you find yourself hankering for a stack yourself but are somehow unable to reach a McDonald's restaurant, the hotcakes' distinctive taste and aroma can be imitated by combining 1 ⅓ cups of Bisquick Pancake Mix, a ½ cup of water, and the secret ingredient of a ½ cup of Sprite.