Should McDonald's Bring Back Pizza? Here's What Twitter Has To Say

Perhaps, the McDonald's social media team saw the success Taco Bell had with announcing the limited-time return of their Mexican Pizza. If not, the tweet this team published on April 21 certainly seems like an attempt to conduct a focus group for their own comeback menu item: "bring back _____." Of course, if McDonald's really wanted to ape Taco Bell, they could bring back their own discontinued pizza. One response has currently received more than 1,800 likes for exhorting McDonald's to do this, saying, "Do it and be legends." "You know me," a second significantly less-liked answer said, "the McPizza or the Steak Bagels."

That, however, is the bulk pushing for the return of the McDonald's Pizza. The reason the Mexican Pizza was welcomed with such rupture was that it enjoyed a large fanbase among Taco Bell customers who protested its removal. As an article published by The Takeout explained, this was particularly true among the South Asian American community, whose vegetarian or halal diets weren't well-represented in the fast-food industry.

A second issue with the return of the McDonald's Pizza is that it was originally removed because it took 11 minutes to make. Mental Floss quotes a now lost explanation given by the company's Canadian branch: "Every McDonald's has a busy kitchen and the pizza slowed down our game. And since speed of service is a top priority and expected by our customers, we thought it best to remove this menu item."

The biggest hurdle for those who seek the return of the McDonald's Pizza is that more people on Twitter want the return of the BTS meal. Just scrolling through the replies to the aforementioned tweet reveal that there isn't even a competition between the two. For example, one request for "bts mcdonals merch + bts meal + sweet chili sauce + cajun sauce + bts photocards" has received more than 600 retweets and 9,000 likes as of writing. Moreover, that's just one tweet.

According to CNN, the BTS meal contributed to a 25.9% sales bump in the quarter they were introduced. The meal itself was 10 chicken nuggets, medium fries, a Coke, and two dipping sauces, which were new to the United States. It was so popular that, as the BBC reported, the Indonesian government had to shut down McDonald's due to worries about the spread of the coronavirus.

While the more cynical may consider the BTS meal and other celebrity collaborations to be little more than ruses to raise precise by slapping a famous name on already-available food and calling it a special promotion, the popularity of BTS is such that people were reselling the bags in which the food came. The attempt to sell the bags speaks to a popularity even greater than that of the Mexican Pizza, which is why Twitter leans more to the return of the BTS meal than the McDonald's Pizza.