Have you ever been at the McDonald's drive-thru, torn about whether to order yourself a medium or large meal after a long, hard day at work? You may have also paused to wonder what the actual size difference is between the medium and large meals, and what you actually get for your extra money. If you can relate to both of those conundrums, then Manchester Evening News reporter Beth Shufflebotham has got your back.
She decided to go above and beyond and "crack out the scales" in order to check the real differences between the meal sizes, to check whether you're really getting more for your money when you get a Maccies large. Let the chip counting commence.
Beth bought a medium and large McNugget meal, which both come with six nuggets, so she was trying to find the discrepancies between the fries and drinks.
She wrote: "I started off by weighing both sets of fries in their original packaging, the medium coming in at 137g, and the large at 177g - a 40g difference. However, I worried that the cardboard may have affected the results, so I used the same bowl, zeroed the scales, and weighed again.
"This time the medium weighed 128g and the large 167g, suggesting the medium cardboard weighed 9g and the large 11g - just 2g difference between them, which is essentially a single fry."
She then went a step further and counted all the chips, finding around 70 and 100 fries in the medium and large portions respectively. Beth found that there were around 40g fewer fries in the medium, which works out to around 24 chips.
The medium liquid weighed 439g to the large 533g - a 94g difference, which works out at about five sips.
Beth concluded: "This may seem like a rather tedious task for me to undertake, however, as the cost of living crisis continues to bite across the UK - every penny counts, right? That means that the difference between a medium and large McDonald's meal, based on this order, is 72p, 24 chips, and five sips of Coca-Cola."
Would you opt for a large meal over a medium? Let us know in the comments.
