The McDonald’s Executive Behind the Viral Mulan Szechuan Sauce from ‘Rick and Morty’ Reveals the Sauce’s Humble Origins
In Season Three of Rick and Morty, Rick reveals that his true character arc has nothing to do with avenging his dead wife. Instead, it has everything to do with a discontinued McDonald’s dipping sauce. In 1998, McDonald’s held a promotion with the Disney movie Mulan that featured Happy Meal toys and a limited-release Szechuan dipping sauce to accompany their Chicken McNuggets. The sauce came and went, but thanks to Rick and Morty, it made its return 19 years later.
In what was surely meant as a one-off random joke in the episode “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” Rick claims the Mulan-themed dipping sauce was “delicious” and that his “series arc” was about getting more of it. Rick and Morty fans, however, took this statement to heart. The sauce went viral overnight. Even McDonald’s tried to get in on the fervor by tweeting “McNugga Lubba Dub Dub” (a bastardization of Rick’s catchphrase). Moreover, the fast-food chain promised the sauce would make a comeback.
True to their word, the sauce came back for a single day in October 2017, but McDonald’s locations across the U.S. were woefully unprepared to meet the intense demand — they ran out so early that only a few lucky fans got to taste the elusive sauce. McDonald’s then tried again in February, 2018 and because they produced 20 million sauce packets for distribution this time, they fared much better. It also briefly reappeared in 2022.
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Tom Ryan was the Chief Marketing Officer at McDonald’s at the time of Mulan’s release and also led the American menu. According to Ryan, McDonald’s had a strategic relationship with Disney at the time, with a focus on Happy Meals. “We went to our vendors and said, ‘We want an Asian-themed sauce that needs to be compatible with Chicken McNuggets, preferably Chinese-positioned, and it needs to taste great,’” he tells me.
The call went out to all their vendors, but Ryan says Mullins Food Products in the greater Chicago area won out. Ryan explains that the sauce “had Asian notes with a hoisin-style character to it and a little bit of sesame oil. It had all the right attributes.” However, he adds that the sauce’s name wasn’t really related to the sauce itself: “We went through the normal naming exercise with our advertising agency, and we decided to call it Szechuan sauce only because that name had the highest recognition of being specifically Chinese.”
Which explains why, even though “spicy” is the first word people might think of for Szechuan food, the sauce itself wasn’t spicy — because a sauce meant for kids couldn’t be spicy.
But the not-actually-Szechuan sauce wasn’t meant to last. “The Szechuan sauce was a short-term thing designed to last as long as the movie promotion, which was typically three months. It was going to come and go,” Ryan explains, although he notes that some markets may have kept it for a bit longer. Still, he didn’t expect to hear about it two decades later from his kids, who are Rick and Morty fans.
For a guy who oversaw the creation of the McFlurry and the McGriddle and was with Pizza Hut during the invention of stuffed-crust pizza, Ryan says the Szechuan sauce is probably his most unusual contribution to the cultural zeitgeist. “I’ve done a lot of things with iconic revenue value in the marketplace, but a Rick and Morty resurrected dipping sauce tied to a Disney movie? I find it very funny that this thing has the life that it has.”
Speaking of which, now that Rick’s wife has been avenged, isn’t it time for Rick and Morty to finally get back to Rick’s true calling?
