McDonald’s CEO Tried to Eat His Own Big Arch Burger on Camera and Used One Word That Said It All
McDonald's has been raising your prices for a decade and calling it unavoidable.
Now the man running the company just sat down in front of a camera to sell you his new burger – and what came out of his mouth told you everything you needed to know about how he sees you.
Chris Kempczinski – the Harvard MBA who pocketed $19.2 million last year running the chain your family grew up eating at – picked up the Big Arch on camera this week, took the smallest bite you've ever seen, and reached for a word that no one who actually eats at McDonald's would ever use.
McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski Has Never Been One of Us
The video was supposed to be a celebration.
McDonald's is launching the Big Arch – two quarter-pound beef patties, three slices of white cheddar cheese, crispy onions, pickles, and a signature sauce – and Kempczinski wanted to be the face of the moment.
He opened the box, forced a wide-eyed "wow," and then froze.
He announced he didn't know how to "attack it."
He took the kind of bite a man takes when a doctor tells him to swallow something unpleasant.
Then he held the burger toward the camera – nearly untouched – and delivered the line that broke the internet.
"It's a delicious product," he said.
Not food. Not a burger. Not lunch.
Product.
Social media didn't miss it for a second.
"What a delicious product, my fellow humans," one commenter fired back.
"It scares me when you call food 'product,'" wrote another.
Musician Garron Noone delivered the verdict that spread fastest: "This man does not eat McDonald's."
McDonald's Price Increases Priced Out the Customers Who Built the Brand
Here's what that word tells you about the men running these companies.
When you walk into McDonald's with your grandkids and spend $60 feeding a family of four, you're buying lunch.
When Chris Kempczinski looks at that same meal, he sees a revenue unit moving through a distribution channel.
This is a Duke undergrad, Harvard MBA, former PepsiCo and Kraft Foods executive who has spent his entire career moving between corporate boardrooms.
While he was climbing that ladder, McDonald's was quietly doubling your bill.
Between 2014 and 2024, average fast-food prices jumped between 39% and 100% – blowing past the 31% general inflation rate over the same period.
McDonald's core customers – working Americans, families watching every dollar – started disappearing.
By the first quarter of 2025, domestic same-store sales had fallen 3.6%, the steepest drop since the pandemic.
Kempczinski himself admitted on an earnings call that traffic from low-income and middle-income consumers was down "nearly double digits."
His solution was to debut a $6.89 to $10.19 burger and film a promotional video where he appeared afraid to eat it.
The Reaction Said Everything Corporate Missed
The mockery wasn't just internet sport – it was recognition.
"So this had to go through dozens of people before getting released," one Reddit user noted. "It shows you how out of touch the c-suite is with these large companies."
"I guarantee him and his cronies insisted to marketing that this would go great," read another thread.
What people were reacting to was the curtain being pulled back on how these executives see ordinary Americans – not as customers to serve, but as a consumer base to manage.
Kempczinski reportedly runs 50 miles a week and orders his Filet-O-Fish without tartar sauce and his Egg McMuffin without bacon – the most joyless possible version of a meal that millions of Americans eat because it's affordable and familiar.
That's not a man who eats McDonald's. That's a man who treats McDonald's as a caloric inconvenience between meetings.
His company spent years raising the price of that affordable, familiar meal – driving out the families who made the Golden Arches iconic – and now he can't eat it on camera without grimacing.
The internet called it embarrassing.
It was actually clarifying.
When the man running one of America's most beloved restaurant chains can't stomach his own food in front of a camera, you don't have a marketing problem.
You have a management problem.
Sources:
- Amber Raiken, "McDonald's CEO faces ridicule over cringeworthy Big Arch taste test video," The Independent via Yahoo, March 3, 2026.
- "McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski Gets Roasted for Bizarre Big Arch Video," Cheapism, March 2, 2026.
- "McDonald's CEO goes viral for how he eats new burger 'product,'" Newsweek, March 2, 2026.
- "McDonald's experiences its largest sales decline since the pandemic," Nation's Restaurant News, May 1, 2025.
- "McDonald's sales decline for first time in years as higher fast food prices hurt demand," Fox Business, July 29, 2024.
- "McDonald's is rapidly losing a vital group of customers," TheStreet, November 8, 2025.
