The Gerber Big Mac and Fries Baby Food rumor may seem like a modern invention, but it was actually born on February 27, 2008. This tasty little tidbit sat in the dark corners of the web until a viral explosion occurred in June and July of 2014. While the McDonald’s Baby Food image didn’t begin as a hoax, this was when the image wad decoupled from its origins and paired with a fabricated press release that not only confirmed the existence of a Big Mac and Fries flavored baby food product, but claimed $1 billion in sales! Here is the story.
The Birth of the McDonald’s Baby Food Hoax
The McDonald’s Big Mac and Fries Gerber Baby food label was created on February 27, 2008, for a digital art contest on Freaking News. The digital rendering of this fictional jar of Big Mac and Fries baby food was a contest submission that tickled people’s funny bone so much it began being circulated on the web. While some folks, undoubtedly, did not understand it was a joke, this would have been the end of it, if not for the one rule of the internet: Nothing ever goes away. The image remained in the joke box for five years, until someone decided to spark off some internet shenanigans around June of 2014.
The true “viral explosion” in mid-2014 occurred when image was decoupled from its contest origins and paired with a fabricated press release claiming $1 billion in quarterly sales. This specific 2014 iteration was designed to look like a leaked marketing report, using “corporate-speak” to trick readers into believing that 70% of the product was actually being consumed by adults.
The “Frankenstein” Hoax: Mixing Fact with Fiction
To add to the confusion, the myth was supercharged by “low-effort” content farms that specialized in viral outrage and clickbait. My sleuthing reveals that one particular site, MadMikesAmerica, published an article on July 16, 2015, titled “WTF? McDonald’s Testing Big Mac & Fries Flavored Baby Food.”
The Clickbait Crap: This wasn’t just a simple repost of the image. The site performed a “Scientific Bait-and-Switch” by taking the 1987 Chicago Tribune report about a real McDonald’s test market, selling Gerber’s Baby Food (for babies) to customers, and slapping the fake 2008 “Gerber Big Mac” label on top of it.
The Social Validation Tangle: By combining a real 1980s headline with a modern fake image, the article was designed to bypass the reader’s “bullshit detector.” It was shared widely on social media, by people who probably never read either article, and where the sheer volume of “likes” provided a false sense of authority. The “MadMike” site has since disappeared into the digital ether (likely a defunct bot farm), but the “Frankenstein” story it created continues to appear in search results today.
Gerber McDonald’s Baby Food was fake, but this isn’t! Gerber once marketed ADULT BABY Food.
Read All About It: Gerber Adult Baby Food: The Biggest Marketing Failure Ever?
Even before this 2015 boost, one website claimed that “Gerber Big Mac and Fries sales are soring [sic]! With $1 billion in sales in its first quarter, Mac & Fries is Gerber’s most popular baby food flavor to hit the market; with a majority of it being sold in southern [sic] United States. And the thing is, more than [sic] 70% of it is being consumed by adults.”
About as close as your gonna get to this in an actual Gerber baby food is Beef and Gravy in the ‘2nd Foods’ line of Gerber products, which is intended for babies 7 to 8 months old. These foods are strained instead of pureed.
This is certainly not the first strange Gerber rumor. Do you remember hearing that Humphrey Bogart was the model for the Gerber baby?
Further Reading: More Food Myths & Marketing Blunders
- The Huge Maxwell House 1990 Branding Mistake
- Did People Actually Like New Coke Better?
- Rice Cookers: From Luxury to Household Necessity
- Loss Leaders: Food Products That Grocery Stores Lose Money On
- The Legal Battle of the Taco Bell Chihuahua