McDonald’s once tried making bubble gum-flavoured broccoli. Is that true?

Yes — it’s true! McDonald’s really did experiment with bubble-gum–flavoured broccoli, and it’s one of the strangest moments in the company’s history.

Why They Tried It

Around 2014, McDonald’s was facing heavy criticism for offering unhealthy food to children. To address this, the company explored ways to improve the nutritional quality of its Happy Meals. One of their ideas was to make vegetables more appealing to kids by giving them fun, unexpected flavours.

Enter: bubble-gum broccoli — a lab-developed hybrid meant to entice young taste buds.

How It Was Supposed to Work

The concept was simple in theory but bizarre in practice: take broccoli and infuse it with a sweet, bubble-gum-like flavour. No artificial colouring, no candy coating — just regular broccoli that tasted like something you’d expect to find in a gumball machine.

The idea was tested with focus groups of children to see whether flavoured vegetables could boost veggie consumption in Happy Meals.

How Kids Reacted

It did not go well.

Kids were confused more than anything else. During focus tests, they reportedly couldn’t identify the flavour. Instead of thinking it tasted like something fun, many said it was just “weird.”

The combination of a vegetable texture with a candy flavour didn’t register in a pleasant way. The experiment quickly became a cautionary tale that you can’t trick kids into liking veggies — especially not with a flavour mismatch that clashes with expectations.

Why McDonald’s Scrapped It

McDonald’s CEO at the time, Don Thompson, later admitted publicly that the idea didn’t work. Since the goal was to promote healthier eating, offering a vegetable with such an unnatural flavour also raised nutritional and philosophical concerns.

In the end, McDonald’s chose more practical health-focused strategies:

• reducing sugar and sodium in kids’ meals

• offering apple slices and milk options

• eventually removing cheeseburgers and pop from default Happy Meal choices

Legacy of the Bubble-Gum Broccoli

The experiment never reached stores, but it became a piece of fast-food folklore — often brought up as an example of just how far companies will go to make kids eat healthier foods.

It’s remembered today as:

• a genuine attempt at innovation

• a marketing curiosity

• and, frankly, an idea that probably should have stayed on the whiteboard

So yes — bubble-gum broccoli absolutely existed, at least in prototype form. It just didn’t survive the taste test.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model