Michael ‘Jim’ Delligatti

Inventor of the double-decker Big Mac whose ‘Meal Disguised as a Sandwich’ became a global phenomenon

MICHAEL “Jim” Delligatti, who has died aged 98, invented the Big Mac and ate at least one of the double-decker hamburgers a week for decades.

“You have to have some responsibility for what you do,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2007. “I eat at McDonald’s all the time and it makes me healthy.”

He had started out in the mid-1950s owning a McDonald’s franchise in a Pittsburgh suburb and by the early 1960s his stable of restaurants had grown to about a dozen.

Sensing that he needed a new product to boost stagnant sales, he decided — after several years and discussions with other McDonald’s operators — that the answer was a double-decker sandwich similar to the popular Big Boy chain’s flagship burger.

Delligatti himself had managed a Big Boy drive-in restaurant in the early 1950s and his invention, he conceded, “wasn’t like discovering the light bulb. The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket”.

The recipe, later immortalised in a 1970s advertising jingle, combined “two all-beef patties” garnished with “special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun”.

Under instructions from head office, Delligatti initially tried to save costs by doing without the larger bun, with its sesame seeds and central slice of bread. But he found that the middle layer, known in the trade as the “club slice”, was a crucial component, because, without it, the mucilaginous ‘special sauce’ made the sandwich too messy. (The lid of the bun is called the “crown” and the base “the heel”.)

The formula of the tangy special sauce was supposed to be a secret, but in 2012 a promotional film from McDonald’s Canada, featuring executive chef Dan Coudreaut, demonstrated a home-made approximation containing mayonnaise, sweet pickle relish, yellow mustard, white wine vinegar, onion powder, garlic powder and paprika.

The “Big Mac Super Sandwich” was sold for the first time from Delligatti’s Uniontown outlet on April 22, 1967.

At 45 cents it was considerably more expensive than the basic burger (18 cents), but customers were undeterred and sales boomed, increasing by 12pc at that one restaurant within a matter of months.

Cautious executives — anxious to avoid a repeat of disastrous earlier innovations, such as the pineapple-based Hula Burger — authorised Delligatti to sell the new line in the rest of his chain, and only after a year of sales improvement was the Big Mac added to menus nationwide.

It was promoted by a television commercial in which a man in a beige suit assembled a Big Mac and said: “This is the sandwich. McDonald’s new Big Mac sandwich. For the bigger than average appetite.”

By 1969 Big Macs represented one fifth of total sales.

The “Meal Disguised as a Sandwich” widened McDonald’s appeal, attracting more grown-up customers, and grew into a potent symbol of the company throughout the world. Economists now use the “Big Mac Index” to compare the value of currencies against the dollar.

Moreover, the Big Mac sold in Ireland today contains a relatively modest 508 calories. Over the years the total fat content has been cut by more than a third, and a Which? report in 1992 hailed it as “nutritionally quite a good choice”.

Michael James Delligatti was born in Uniontown, an hour’s drive south of Pittsburgh, on August 2, 1918, the son of James, who had various jobs including that of cobbler; and Lucille.

James attended Fairmont High School, West Virginia, before wartime service in Europe with the 26th Infantry Division. Returning to the US after the war he hitchhiked to California and soon started working in the fast food business, settling at Big Boy in the early 1950s.

In 1953 he went into partnership, opening Delney’s Drive-In Restaurant in Pittsburgh. Two years after that he met Ray Kroc — who had recently founded McDonald’s — at a restaurant convention, and Kroc signed him up as a franchisee.

According to company lore, when Delligatti consulted Kroc a few years later about his new double-deck hamburger, the founder asked: “Does it have tomatoes on it?”

The answer was “No”. “Good,” replied Kroc, who disliked tomatoes. “Let’s roll with it.”

Jim Delligatti, who died on November 28, is survived by his wife Ellie and two sons, both of whom own McDonald’s franchises.