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At the Home Depot, how doers get more done. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Did you know that Roman Catholics were responsible for one of McDonald's most storied sandwiches? Here to tell the story of Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel. Give me that never fish, give me that fish Give me that never live this Give me that fish What if it were you hanging up on this wall?
If it were you For you in that Sandwich, you wouldn't be laughing. The filet fish is one of the more curious items on the McDonald's menu in that it receives virtually no advertising whatsoever, yet still continues to be sold by the chain despite the fact that nobody ever seems to order one, as well as the fact that you have to cook it in a separate fryer from other items. As it turns out, they keep it around because the fileta fish is actually intended to be eaten by a very specific type of customer, people who abstain from eating non-seafood meat for various reasons. According to McDonald's executives, approximately 23% of the filet fish sandwiches sold by the chain each year are sold during Lent. While the exact rules vary somewhat from region to region, in general, Catholics traditionally abstain from eating most meats on Fridays and Saturdays during this period.
Moving on, or rather back, in 1960 at a small McDonald's restaurant in Ohio, the owner of the franchise, a man called Lou Grown, was struggling to keep his restaurant open. No stranger to troubles or hard work, Grown had been kicked out of his home by his father as a teenager. His mother abandoned the family when he was three years old to pursue an ill-fated career as an actress in Hollywood. Homeless during the Great Depression, with no real skills to speak of, and occasionally having to steal food to survive, Grown did eventually find work and then continued to better his situation by simply working harder than everyone else around him. Fast forward a couple of decades and he found himself the president of the Cincinnati Restaurant Association.
It was in this position that he had a chance encounter with one Ray Kroc, the God-King of the McDonald's Empire, which led to Grone taking his life savings as well as borrowing some money from a few friends and starting a McDonald's franchise in 1959. Unfortunately for Grone, this was a time when pretty much no one had heard of. McDonald's, and he was competing with a lot of other restaurants that sold more or less the exact same thing as he did: burgers. As a result of all this, this hard-working father of two was barely able to keep the then-fledging franchise location open. As Gron would later recall, I was struggling.
The crew was my wife, myself, and a man named George. I did repairs, swept floors, you name it. Needless to say, despite working from sunup to sundown and relying on the free labor of his family, times were tough, especially on Fridays, a day which would normally be the most lucrative day of the week for most restaurants. You see, Grohn's restaurant was located in an area that was 87% Catholic. At that time in the United States, most Catholics abstained from eating land or air-based meat products every Friday of the year, not just during certain days of the week during Lent, as is more common today.
The result? According to Gron, his restaurant barely grossed $75 a Friday. What confused Grohn was that other restaurants in the area, like Big Boy's Locations, which offered more or less the same thing he did, seemed to be doing fine, both in general and on Fridays.
So he decided to do a little recon to see what they were doing differently. What Grohn found was that in addition to standard items like hamburgers and the like, they also sold fish. With this information in hand, Gron went back to his restaurant and began workshopping a new idea for a fish-based sandwich. After a lot of experimenting, he came up with a recipe for a battered halibut patty, but he was still operating under the McDonald's banner, so he couldn't just go and put it on the menu.
So, in 1961, Grone tried to pitch the idea to Ray Kroc, who immediately shot him down. Not pulling any punches, Grone later stated Kroc told him, You're always coming up here with a bunch of crap. I don't want my stores stunk up with the smell of fish. With his restaurant about to go under and his ability to provide for his children at stake, Grohn persisted, eventually convincing Kroc to let him trial the fish burger for a single day. But Kroc did have a few stipulations.
First, Krohn had to figure out how to make the sandwich cheaper since corporate wanted to sell it for 25 cents. This was a problem considering Grohn's halibut patties cost approximately 30 cents to make. Krohn addressed this by substituting the halibut for cheaper Atlantic cod and adding a single slice of cheese for extra flavor. Secondly, the sandwich would be in direct competition with another sandwich created by Kroc personally, the Hulaburger. I said, well, we'll take a slice of pineapple.
And incidentally, this is a great sandwich at home. Fix it up. You will grill it in butter. And put a slice of cheddar cheese on top, one on the bottom, and put it on toasted bun or bread. And they call it a hula burger.
And they said, I like the hula, but where's the burger? Despite sounding questionably appetizing, Kroc was convinced that it would be a huge seller and confidently proposed a challenge. Both items would be added to the menu of a McDonald's restaurant on Good Friday of 1962, and whichever sandwich sold more would be permanently added to the broader McDonald's menu. This would make it the first new item to be added to said menu since McDonald's became a nationwide franchise. As for Kroc's pineapple burger, Groan stated, I called in McDonald's and said, how many sandwiches did Kroc sell?
They said, I can't tell you. They asked, how many did you sell? I said, 350. Then they said, it's on the menu. Uh While Grohn never found out how many of the hula burgers were sold, the rumor mill has it that the number was around a half-dozen sandwiches.
With ample evidence that there was considerable demand for fish-based sandwiches, Kroc gave Gron the permission to begin selling the Philea fish permanently.
However, initially, Gron sold the sandwich using his original, more expensive, halibut recipe, right up until the Philea fish was introduced to other McDonald's franchises in 1963, at which point he was forced to switch to the cheaper Atlantic cod. Eventually, McDonald's substituted even cheaper fish as stocks of Atlantic cod dwindled, resulting in pressure being placed on the company to search for a more sustainable option. They currently use Alaskan Pollock, having recently been forced away from hockey, which was completely phased out in 2013. Despite being responsible for the first new item added to the McDonald's menu in its young nationwide history, predating the better-known Big Mac by about half a decade, Grohn received no money for creating the sandwich. That said, he credited the Philea Fish Sandwich with saving his franchise, selling a whopping 2,324 of the Philea Fish in the first month alone.
As business began to boom, he ultimately was able to purchase more McDonald's locations, eventually owning some 43 franchises by the time he retired in the 1980s, combined grossing $60 million per year in sales, which is about $130 million today, and he also employed over 3,000 people. Needless to say, he retired a very wealthy man, though given his hard-working nature, he chose not to settle down until his body made him, continually dabbling in various business ventures until a few years before his death on May 30th, 2011, at the age of 93. As he said in an interview in 2005 when recovering from back surgery, and he shortly thereafter broke his hip while on vacation, I'm at life at 88 years of age, and I'm bored. I see opportunities all around me. I drool.
But Father Time is telling me, Buddy, you've had your fling. Forget about it. Everywhere the American flag flies, you'll find the golden arches, and there you'll find good people. Because no matter who you are, everyone loves something at McDonald's. There's always something to have.
I like The fish. I like it. You could do a little bit more tartar sauce someplace. Seriously. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Engler.
And a special thanks to Simon Whistler. And you can check him out at the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, the Brain Food Show podcast. And what a story he told here. The genesis, the birth of the Phileo fish sandwich. It started with a desperate franchise owner trying to make a little extra money catering to Catholics.
There was a competition to see which idea would work. adding something to the McDonald's menu, which won the day. Save Grohn's franchise and would help Grohn grow to 43 McDonald's franchises and almost 3,000 employees. The story of how the Phileo Fish Sandwich Came to Be. Here.
on our American stories. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa, witnessing MMA Legends final fight. Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport. Defends her PFL world title one last time.
Unforgettable and got you sorry. To an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem?
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