A McDonald’s executive takes you inside the viral Grimace Shake trend and how the burger giant dealt with it

For those who don’t remember what life on the internet looked like in 2023, here’s a refresher: girl dinner, the Roman Empire, and a Tik Tok algorithm painted purple from the Mc Donald’s Grimace Shake. The trend was simple, albeit strange: Users would film themselves trying out the purple Mc Donald’s beverage and then immediately cut to a horror-movie scene of their staged death. The purple vanilla-berry-flavored milkshake was rolled out by the fast-food chain in June of that year as a limited-edition menu item in honor of one of the chain’s mascots, Grimace. While the fake death trend garnered over 2.9 billion views on TikTok, and reportedly boosted McDonald’s sales by 10% that quarter, it was not planned to unfold like it did. “If you think we planted the Grimace Shake trend … thank you. So much. But you think way too highly of us,” Guillaume Huin, senior marketing director at McDonald’s, wrote on X. “If you thought we would never acknowledge the trend … well, I thought so too at first, so I don’t blame you.” “Pure Gen Z humor” On Thursday, almost three years after the trend, Huin took to X to share how the team at McDonald’s and its agency partners reacted to going viral. (Grimace is now apparently taking over German social media after the shake recently launched there.) Huin’s post offers a rare glimpse into how large companies treat viral moments, often dealing with them from a full-fledged situation room. The executive says he first encountered the trend at home, scrolling on social media and coming across one video after another of users “losing control” after trying a Grimace Shake. He decided to tell management and leadership of the phenomenon, not quite sure what it meant just yet. “At first, I won’t lie, this felt like telling your parents about a massive mistake you made that would ruin all your hard work,” he said. The first t