The Roast Beef Sandwich McDonald's Released As A Follow-Up To The Filet-O-Fish In The 1960s

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Patrons of McDonald's will be familiar with the restaurant's suite of classic menu items (which we've helpfully ranked for you), from the Big Mac to Chicken McNuggets. But well before the brand established these iconic menu staples, the company briefly offered a different sort of sandwich: roast beef.

Following the success of the Filet-O-Fish (which was initially met with resistance) as an alternative to hamburgers in the 1960s, McDonald's was open to growing its menu to attract new customers. Eyeing the rise of Arby's, a McDonald's franchise owner in Cleveland experimented with selling his own homemade roast beef. The item was a resounding success, and that caught the attention of McDonald's founder Ray Krok.

Enter Roast Beef on a Roll: Thinly shaved beef on a buttered sesame bun with a side of barbecue sauce. Though the sandwich sold well when it debuted in 1968, an accounting error ultimately rendered the item a financial fail.

The first challenge for McDonald's roast beef sandwich was finding a way to scale up the product to fit with the brand's fast food model. Rather than making slow-roasted beef in store, premade roasts were sliced and reheated in oil.

The late food writer Holly Moore (author of Holly Eats), who worked in product development at the time, wrote that the Roast Beef on a Roll was an "acquired taste," according to Retroist. The beef wasn't as tasty as the traditionally prepared method, but the sauce mostly masked its flavor.

After the sandwich rolled out in select McDonald's locations in 1968, it garnered a modest increase in sales. But the venture came crashing down when an accountant noticed that pricing calculations did not account for beef shrinking as it cooked, and the miscalculation ultimately spelled less profit. Furthermore, the roast beef roll required franchises to have a meat slicer, with the company sinking $300,000 in meat slicers that they had already ordered.

"Roast beef is difficult for our kind of operation to deal with," says Krok in his 1977 memoir "Grinding It Out". "It went well in a few stores, but it simply did not adapt to our system. We learned a lot about testing requirements in that roast beef fiasco, though." Though roast beef at McDonald's was a bust, here's a list of 20 celebrated roast beef sammies from across the US.