McDonald’s pulled Quarter Pounders from one-fifth of its U.S. stores Tuesday as a result of the outbreak, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said had sickened at least 49 people in 10 states. One person died and 10 were hospitalized, according to the CDC.

A preliminary investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suggested fresh slivered onions that are served raw on Quarter Pounder hamburgers were a likely source of the contamination.

McDonald’s said it was searching for a new regional supplier for fresh onions. In the meantime, Quarter Pounders were removed from menus in the impacted states as well as portions of other states.

McDonald’s said it has worked closely with federal food safety regulators since late last week, when it was alerted to the potential outbreak. The company said the scope of the problem and the popularity of its products have complicated efforts to identify the contamination source.

McDonald’s has more than 14,000 U.S. stores and serves 1 million Quarter Pounders every two weeks in the affected area.

McDonald’s is known for its stringent food safety guidelines and protocols, said Chris Gaulke, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration. The company said Wednesday that the supplier regularly tested its onions for E. coli, for example.

“Given the volume of food that they go through, how infrequently this happens to McDonald’s is a testament to the effort that they take,” Gaulke said.

But some experts questioned why McDonald’s simply stopped selling one sandwich and didn’t close restaurants for further investigation.

“Good practice would have been to close all the restaurants,” Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in food safety cases, said. “Until we know definitively what the product was that made people sick, consumers should be aware.”

Marler said cross-contamination remains a potential possibility at the affected restaurants until they are thoroughly cleaned.

Asked why it didn’t close any stores, McDonald’s said nothing in the government’s investigation indicated there were issues with its food preparation practices. In an interview on the “Today” show Wednesday, McDonald’s U.S. President Joe Erlinger also said it’s likely that whatever product was contaminated has already passed through the company’s supply chain.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the outbreak late Tuesday. It said infections were reported between Sept. 27 and Oct. 11 in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

State and local public health officials were interviewing people about the foods they ate in the week before they got sick. Of the 18 people interviewed as of Tuesday, all reported eating at McDonald’s, and 16 people reported eating a beef hamburger. Twelve reported eating a Quarter Pounder.

McDonald’s said it’s unlikely the beef in the Quarter Pounder was the source, since it comes from multiple suppliers and is cooked at a high enough temperature to kill E. coli.

McDonald’s said its initial findings suggest that some of the reported illnesses were linked to onions from a single supplier, which the company didn’t name. McDonald’s said the onions are cleaned and sliced by the supplier and then packaged for use on individual Quarter Pounders.

The incubation period for E. coli is only a couple of days, so illness would be quickly apparent to anyone affected, said Donald Schaffner, a food safety expert at Rutgers University. “If you ate these burgers in September and now it’s the middle of October and you didn’t get sick, you’re probably OK,” he said.

E. coli bacteria are harbored in the guts of animals and found in the environment. Infections can cause severe illness, including fever, stomach cramps and bloody diarrhea. People who develop symptoms of E. coli poisoning should seek health care immediately and tell the provider what they ate.

The type of bacteria implicated in the McDonald’s food causes about 74,000 infections in the U.S. annually, leading to more than 2,000 hospitalizations and 61 deaths each year, according to the CDC. In general, E. coli infections were lower in 2023 than in recent years and cases of severe kidney injury caused by the bacteria remained stable, according to latest federal data.

Outbreaks at restaurant chains are rare, but they do happen.

In 2020, Chipotle agreed to pay a record $25 million fine to resolve criminal charges that it served tainted food that sickened more than 1,100 people with E. coli between 2015 and 2018. In that case, poor safety practices, such as not keeping food at proper temperatures to prevent pathogen growth, were to blame.

In 2006, Taco Bell ordered the removal of green onions from its restaurants nationwide after samples taken by investigators appeared to contain a harsh strain of E. coli. The outbreak sickened at least 71 people.

“The worst thing you can have at a restaurant is a food safety problem. It’s the equivalent of an airline losing the plane,” said Aaron Allen, a restaurant consultant and founder of Aaron Allen and Associates.

But Allen said McDonald’s has enough experience and safety protocols in place that it won’t suffer long-term damage from the outbreak.

“No one would be better equipped to mitigate and respond to this than McDonald’s,” he said.

McDonald’s shares fell 4.7% in late trading Wednesday.

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Shake Shack, the Big Apple-based competitor to In-N-Out known for smash burgers, crinkle-cut fries and milkshakes, announced that six California storefronts, including the only Oakland location, would close by the end of next month. Ownership cited underperformance as the primary factor for the closures, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Most locations will close around Los Angeles; the other three outposts to shutter are in Columbus, Ohio, and Houston, Texas.

Oddly enough, the announced Oakland closure at 1954 Telegraph Ave. comes a bit late: That Shake Shack has already permanently shuttered, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The restaurant, which opened to much fanfare in December 2020, has reportedly been empty and closed since at least July 2024. The company website does not reflect the closure, as of yet. A phone call to the location went straight to an automated message.

Despite the Oakland closure, Shake Shack is still investing in the Bay Area with two new-ish locations recently opening up in Walnut Creek and Santa Rosa, as well as in San Jose. The Bay Area is home to 11 Shake Shack locations.

The affected Los Angeles-area restaurants are in Downtown LA’s Bunker Hill neighborhood, at the Westfield Topanga mall in Canoga Park, and in Silver Lake, Koreatown and Culver City. While already showing as closed on Google, the Silver Lake location in particular was a highly visible outlet for the brand, located next door to the historic gay bar the Black Cat and just steps from actor and musician Donald Glover’s Jellyman boba shop.

Fear not, Shake Shack burger fans. There are still more than 20 locations in the greater Los Angeles area that are operating, including a first-in-the-state drive-thru that opened just this month. The company operates nearly 330 nationwide and over 400 restaurants across the world.

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“I was teaching at Purdue University in Indiana,” recalls food historian George Geary, author of Made in California. “One day I was driving down the highway and I noticed all of the fast-food places that were off the next off-ramp. There were about 14 listed, and I realized most of those were from California!”

Why Los Angeles in particular and California in general became fast foods’ greatest exporter is a multi-faceted question. According to Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams, part of the answer is simple — we are just pretty rad.

“California, it’s always had this mystique around its effortlessness and coolness, and some of that has to do with the weather,” he says. “[It’s ] looser in terms of conventions, in terms of dress, in terms of conversation, in terms of the way of life.”

And nowhere is cooler than Los Angeles. The greater L.A. area alone is the birthplace of many chains: In-N-Out, Taco Bell, Fatburger, Panda Express, Hot Dog on a Stick, Orange Julius, Bob’s Big Boy, Fosters Freeze, Original Tommy’s, The Blimp (now Carl’s Jr.), Wienerschnitzel, Wahoo’s Fish Tacos, and Pioneer Chicken. Farther afield is San Bernardino’s McDonald’s, San Diego’s Jack-in-the-Box, and Yermo’s Del Taco.

How did it happen?

But we cannot claim to be the founders of fast foods as a concept. According to John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, authors of Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age, fast service food has been around worldwide since the Industrial Revolution in the form of coffee shops and oyster houses.

During the 1880s, soda fountains and drug store counters across the country began serving quick soup and sandwich meals along with popular novelty drinks and ice creams. Then there were inexpensive fair foods — the hot dogs and hamburgers served at county fairs and amusement destinations like Coney Island and the Santa Monica Pier.

Chandler argues that the first true modern fast food restaurant was White Castle, which opened in Wichita, Kansas in 1921. “1920 was famously the first year that more people showed up on the U.S. Census as living in cities instead of outside of cities,” he says. “People were congregating in urban centers and working at factories, and a lot of this had to do with electricity and just general movements of populations. And so, people needed to eat something.
They were working in factories every day and they wanted something that was quick and cheap.”

Growing road system

As more and more people drove and commuted to work, those tried and true fair food favorites began to be sold in roadside shacks along America’s burgeoning highway system.

In Southern California, these included the Rite Spot in Pasadena, where owner Lionel Sternberger is said to have invented the cheeseburger in the 1920s. Southern California, with its perfect weather, spread out populace, and pioneering spirit was the ideal place for small business owners to open their very own “road food” stands.

“Most stands were seasonal since, until the late 1920s, motoring was primarily a warm-weather proposition. Only in mild-winter states like California and Florida did stands operate all year,” Jakle and Sculle write.

“Highway selling was ideal for entrepreneurs willing to experiment with limited capital. The roadside stand … was hailed as one of America’s last ‘frontiers’ for independent businessmen. Most stands were built by their owners, the capital invested largely that of ‘sweat equity.’”

Driving change

And then there was SoCal’s early embrace of car culture, and the popularity of drive-ins, staffed with pretty carhops, and high fat, highly caloric comfort food at an affordable price.

“In the 1930s in Southern California there developed a remarkable phenomenon in the food service business,” Ray Kroc, who took McDonald’s to the stratosphere, recalled, according to Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. “It was the drive-in restaurant, a product of the Great Depression’s crimp on the free-wheeling lifestyle that had grown up around movie-happy Hollywood. Drive-ins sprouted in city parking lots and spread along canyon drives. Barbeque, beef, pork and chicken were the typical menu mainstays, but there was an endless variety in approaches as feverish operators hustled to outdo each other.”

Southern California’s unique lifestyle also contributed to the need for fast food. “The building of the suburbs is huge, the growth of the highways, and that introduces all these other facets — the rise of two income households, more women are joining the workforce,” Chandler says.

“So, the erosion of traditional gender roles when it comes to making dinner, the rise of commutes, make it so that you’re kind of eating on the go and there’s more distance between work and home. So, a lot of these things create a need for someone to step into the gap here and fast food places do that.”

Dreamy entrepreneurs of all stripes flourished in this heady environment, where taking risks, whether it involved the space race or mom and pop startups, was encouraged. “Southern California is a place where people innovate,” says food writer Katherine Spiers, of How to Eat L.A.

The innovations in fast food came fast and furious in the post-World War II era. The McDonald brothers pioneered a new kind of assembly line food production, which they coined their “speedee service system,” maximizing efficiency and convenience. Every menu item was standardized — only two pickles per hamburger, no exceptions. “If we gave people choice, there would be chaos,” Dick McDonald explained, per McDonalds: Behind the Arches.

In-N-Out Burger

Out in Baldwin Park, Esther and Harry Snyder opened the first In-N-Out Burger in 1948, which along with their contemporary Jack in the Box (founded in San Diego in 1951) revolutionized the drive-thru system we now see as the fast food norm.

“What was unique about them both is that when they started, they both were drive through only,” Chandler says. “So, you didn’t get out of your car and walk up to a window, you just drove through. And In-N-Out in particular had a two-way speaker that was built by Harry Snyder in his garage, which is its own kind of classic tinkering-in-your-garage American innovation story that we tend to love.”

Fatburger

Los Angeles was also home to a particular brand of enterprising visionaries, who may not have been given the capital, or chance, to flourish in other parts of the country due to racism and sexism. In 1948, Lovie Yancey and a partner opened Mr. Fatburger on Western Avenue. Initially a three-seat counter made of scrap metal, Yancey soon bought out her partner, changed the name to Fatburger and worked tirelessly to make it a smashing success.

“She apparently really loved working in the restaurant,” Spiers says. “And she would work 20-hour days and sleep under the counter sometimes. She kept having people knocking on the door after they were closed at a reasonable hour. So, she was like, ‘well, I want to feed people. Guess I’m staying open late’.”

Yancey also tapped into post-war America’s obsession with large portions of food for a low price. “There was a real efficiency in American culture and in American cuisine at the time, the idea that you could just have an enormous burger and that would be your meal was exciting,” Chandler says.

“It had everything you needed kind of fit into this space age, high industry mood of the time, spirit of the time. And so Fat Burger was a big burger. It still is a big burger. And people were interested in something that was a challenge to eat — something you needed two hands to eat — that was appealing.”

Taco Bell

Fast food pioneers also often appropriated the foods of the numerous diverse cultures that called Southern California home. In San Bernardino, a young entrepreneur named Glen Bell fell in love with the tacos served at the Mexican American owned Mitla Café. In 1962, he opened the first Taco Bell in Downey.

“Glen Bell picks up this bit of cuisine and he is interested in it and he just kind of makes it his own mission to present it to the masses,” Chandler says. “And the taco was an exotic thing back then, and now it’s the most normative dining thing next to the hamburger you can have in America.”

As Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times notes, there was also a spirit of collaboration among many of SoCal’s fast-food titans, who were more than happy to share their innovations with other upstart entrepreneurs. “There was a fraternity of us, and every one of us saw the McDonald’s in San Bernardino and basically copied it after the boys gave us a tour,” James Collins, head of Collins Food International (KFC) remembered, per Morrison. “We became good friends, and we all took our lessons from the McDonald brothers.”

Dump that guilt

By the 1960s and ‘70s SoCal-born fast food was expanding, spreading a unique brand of American culture throughout the globe. Today there are over 38,000 McDonald’s, 8,500 Taco Bells, and 3,100 Carl’s Jrs. And while some Californians may feel guilty for introducing the oft-maligned, problematic fast food universe to the world, Geary has come to terms with his love of a quick meal.

While attending a high-end cuisine conference in 1995, he found himself at a dinner at a grand Philadelphia train station. But there was one problem, the caterers had messed up, and there was no food. “I was sitting with Julia Child and she’s like, ‘we’re hungry!’ Because it was a train station, they had a McDonald’s. So, a few of us got up and I thought, ‘okay, I guess it’s okay to eat the fast food in front of these people.’ And then Julia Child ate French fries,” Geary recalls. “And I thought, ‘you know what? If she can do it, I can do it.’”

So next time you’ve got a hankering for a good ole processed burger with fries, instead of guilt, feel a sense of hometown pride. “We wouldn’t have the American fast food culture that we have today without Southern California,” Chandler says.

“I think if you created a map and looked at all the chains that came out of a 45 mile radius in Southern California and stacked it up to other businesses elsewhere, not just in fast food, but in any industry, you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of things that really compete in terms of name recognition and endurance and excitement than what’s grown out of Southern California’s fast food boom.”

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The polarizing law, which has been praised by advocates for low-income workers and blasted by the restaurant industry, is expected to lead to menu price increases at many popular chains, including McDonald’s and Chipotle.

The quick-service restaurant industry employs at least 500,000 Californians, but how many of them qualify for the raise?

The California Department of Industrial Relations has published a Frequently Asked Questions website about AB 1228 with the hope of clearing up any confusion.

Among the more pressing questions are: what is considered a “fast food restaurant,” and which employees are covered by the new law?

According to the state’s website, it must be a “limited-service restaurant … that offers limited or no table service, where customers order food or beverage items and pay for them before they are consumed.”

Also, the food must be intended for “immediate consumption.”

But even if a restaurant meets those criteria, there is yet another layer.

A smaller, locally owned and operated burger joint or taco shop per se will not be impacted by the new law if it is not part of a chain of at least 60 restaurants nationwide.  

“Business locations performing only administrative, warehouse, or food preparation work are not counted as “establishments” toward the 60-establishment minimum,” the state explains.

What if a restaurant serves food for “immediate consumption” but also offers prepared dishes to be heated and served later?

This is where things get a bit murky.

If a restaurant earns more than 50% of its gross income from selling food or beverage items for “immediate consumption,” then its employees should be paid $20 an hour starting Monday.

“For example, if a fast food pizza restaurant earns 30% of its revenue from ‘take and bake’ pizza to be baked at home, but earns 70% of its revenue from sales of fully-cooked food and beverages for immediate consumption, the restaurant is primarily engaged in selling food and beverage for immediate consumption and would be covered by the new law (provided no other exemption applies),” according to the FAQs

What about ice cream, boba tea, pretzel and donut shops?

If they are part of a chain of at least 60 restaurants, yes, they are considered to be “fast food” and must adhere to AB 1228.

One of the more controversial elements of the new law is the exemption for restaurants that also operate as a bakery that “produces” and sells “bread” as a stand-alone menu item.

Why is “bread” in quotation marks? Because that also needed to be defined.

The FAQ website explains, “Bread is defined as a single unit item that weighs at least ½ pound after cooling and must be sold as a stand-alone item.”

Hamburger buns, croissants, muffins, scones and rolls don’t count because they aren’t heavy enough.

Also, restaurants aren’t exempt if they don’t produce bread on-site, which also needed to be defined because some restaurants bake pre-made dough (those aren’t exempt).

Initially, it appeared that Panera Bread would be exempt, which led to an unflattering article from Bloomberg which reported that it was a carve-out for a wealthy Gov. Gavin Newsom donor, Greg Flynn, who owns two dozen Panera Bread locations in California.

Both Newsom and Flynn denied the assertion and Flynn later announced that he would abide by the new law.

What if a grocery store serves fast food at a separate counter or kiosk?

AB 1228 might not apply.

There’s an exemption for fast food establishments located within a store “over 15,000 square feet in size” that sells primarily “household foodstuffs,” including fresh produce, meat, poultry, fish, deli products, dairy products, canned foods, dry foods, beverages, baked foods, or prepared foods to be consumed offsite.

The new law includes many other provisions, including whether fast food managers are exempt, whether workers who receive tips are exempt (they’re not), and why there could be differences between two employees who work for the same chain. Read all FAQs about California’s new fast food minimum wage law here.

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DON THOMPSON | Associated Press

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a nation-leading measure giving more than a half-million fast food workers more power and protections, despite the objections of restaurant owners who warned it would drive up consumers’ costs.

The landmark law creates a 10-member Fast Food Council with equal numbers of workers’ delegates and employers’ representatives, along with two state officials, empowered to set minimum standards for wages, hours and working conditions in California.

Newsom said he was proud to sign the measure into law on Labor Day.

“California is committed to ensuring that the men and women who have helped build our world-class economy are able to share in the state’s prosperity,” he said in a statement. “Today’s action gives hardworking fast food workers a stronger voice and seat at the table to set fair wages and critical health and safety standards across the industry.”

The law caps minimum wage increases for fast food workers at chains with more than 100 restaurants at $22 an hour next year, compared to the statewide minimum of $15.50 an hour, with cost of living increases thereafter.

The state legislature approved the measure on Aug. 29. Debate split along party lines, with Republicans opposed.

Sen. Brian Dahle, the Republican nominee for governor in November, had called it “a steppingstone to unionize all these workers.”

Supporters had said they hoped the measure would inspire similar efforts elsewhere.

The measure’s author, Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, said it would “a new way to ensure marginalized workers have a voice in the workplace.”

Restaurant owners and franchisers opposed the law, citing an analysis they commissioned by the UC Riverside Center for Economic Forecast and Development saying that the legislation would increase consumers’ costs.

The International Franchise Association called it a “fork in the eye” of people who run restaurant franchises and said it could raise consumer prices as much as 20%.

“This bill has been built on a lie, and now small business owners, their employees, and their customers will have to pay the price,” IFA President and CEO Matthew Haller said in a statement. “Franchises already pay higher wages and offer more opportunity for advancement than their independent counterparts, and this bill unfairly targets one of the greatest models for achieving the American Dream and the millions of people it supports.”

However, Holden urged opponents to give the law a chance.

“Speaking as a former franchise owner, I would have welcomed this inclusive process, that in reality benefits not only the the worker but franchisee as well,” he said in a statement.

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