19
votes
McDonald's is bringing back its discontinued Snack Wrap in the US
Link information
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- Title
- Snack Wrap unwrapped: Here's why McDonald's is bringing back a fan favorite on July 10
- Published
- Jun 3 2025
- Word count
- 1097 words
Ok so this is an advertisement right? Does AP normally do ads?
Knowing this, I read it anyway in the hopes I could find something to be snarky about so here goes:
Cool. Eating junk food is ok if you feel like you’re being healthier.
Not every article that involves a brand is an advertisement. But of course, companies want to encourage articles that show them in a good light.
If there are people out there that legitimately are interested in this product, then this article would certainly be legitimate news.
Is this an article McDonald's is pleased to see? Absolutely.
I also am quite aware that companies release press releases and hope they get picked up. It seems to me often a symbiotic relationship. Sometimes companies say things some people do want to hear.
How does anything make news? People talk about stuff and some of that stuff gets picked up.
Tens of millions of people eat at McDonalds everyday. I'd say this is actually more relevant and directly impactful to more people's lives than most news are.
Isn't the Snack Wrap just chicken in a tortilla with some ranch? Looking at the nutritional info it's not bad.
The item doesn’t seem to be on the website yet so I don’t know what nutritional info you are looking at. But it’s fried breaded chicken with ranch and cheese in a wheat tortilla (which has way more calories than most people tend to realize).
I was looking at the Canadian website for McD and just making an assumption that it'd be similar to the American one. I was looking at the grilled chicken variant that the mentioned person was eating. That one would be 260 calories. Link
McDonald's may or may not use the same recipe for the US, but in 2013, a similar (the same?) McWrap was 360 calories which is still fine. I'm guessing the US Snack Wrap will be somewhere around 300 calories.
As him being a mental health counselor....
It worked wonders for Subway before they got exposed for overloading their bread with unhealthy amounts of sugar. Also before Jared Fogle got busted for possessing CP.
Five grams of sugar is not very much. The whole cake thing is just a tax fight. Sugar in baked goods effects the flavor, texture, browning of the crust, and feeds the yeast.
That prompted me to check a Japanese milk bread recipe I had used a couple times before the sugar and butter made me sick to think about. 60g sugar to 370g flour. Now that would be unhealthy*! Subway penalized at 5g seems like a technicality due to the law rather than being unhealthy, as the article notes it's the same amount of sugar as two plain digestives.
EDIT: although, if we scaled it up to the ratios that were given in the article (1:10), then subways would be 37g sugar to 370g flour. Still a lot, as half of a very sugary bread is still a sugary bread.
* Add in another 60g of butter.
A grilled chicken wrap with lettuce (and optionally tomato) is honestly fine. Sure, it could use a whole wheat tortilla and less cheese or ranch, but you can do far worse at McDonald's!
They were my favourite light option when I worked at McDonald's. Wrap plus a salad was my go-to healthier meal.
Sounds like they're using the new chicken strips for those. I tried them the other day out of curiosity. I was personally not impressed. They're not bad, but they're certainly not great. And I tend to be enthused about these sorts of things. I'm sure they tested well or they wouldn't've done them.
My attitude about fast food is that it is merely one type of prepared food. What you get in most big chain restaurants of whatever kind; frozen prepared foods from grocery stores - it's all removed from the raw ingredients. There's various levels of quality, convenience, health. I think it's right to be concerned about them all to some degree - they tend to be less healthy. But I think they're fine in moderation.
I think folks who rail against fast food but not against sit-down restaurants that offer dishes with more calories, more fat, more sugars — that's just silly to me. I'm also not scared of "chemicals", as long as science has done its best to research.
I try to balance the food I consume. As a diabetic, I have to be reasonable about carbs. As someone overweight trying to lose weight, I have to be concerned about calories, as well as getting enough protein without too much fat or carbs, but some fat and carbs. As someone on dialysis, I have restrictions and things I have to minimize - most annoyingly, liquid.
In a perfect world, I'd have te energy to cook a protein, some veggies, and a small starch for every meal. In practice, I don't have that energy. So various prepared foods are a part of my diet, but I try to be reasonable about them.
I found this: https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca/product/ranch-chicken-snack-wrap-crispy-for-relaunch.html
I tend to try for 1500-2000 calories per day. If that's in three meals, that's about 600 calories per meal. So a couple of these wraps, or one plus some sort of side. It's not a lot of food for me back in the old days when I was always hungry and could eat two fast food comboes easily, but these days, that's not bad. I just had two slices of pizza for dinner. I used to do 5-8 slices easily.
The fat definitely doesn't bother me, it's reasonable. 28g of carbs is about half of my 60g/meal budget, so it's fine. 17g protein is not amazing, but quite workable. The sodium for me is an issue - my goal, other than basically "as low as possible" is like "1500mg or less per day". But prepared foods are bad about this. And this one is not excessive for what it is.
I'm really not worried about the ingredients in the tortilla, the lettuce, the cheese, the chicken... is there ranch on this one? I'm fine with that.
If you made this at your house - if you wanted to replicate the fried chicken, that's really the main place that you might end up a little different on the "chemicals" front, as you don't need it to be stable for longer, so you could keep it simpler with the chicken and breading and seasoning. But again, to me, chemicals are not "scary"......
Is this an amazing product? No. Is it healthy? I think that's a loaded discussion, but things like this fit into my diet just fine — in moderation. I don't want to live on this stuff, but it can absolutely be one of my daily meals easily, sure.
But also
So too complicated for Americans to make, but not too complicated for Irish fast food workers?
I used to work at McDonald's, so I can actually answer this question!
The problem is rolling a burrito (or snack wrap) is a whole separate process you can't assembly line like a burger. It's easy to send burgers down a line to make food fast, but wraps are a whole different beast. You need a separate wrapping station that breaks the whole food prep flow!
The kind of volume American McDonald's handle can be crazy, and many franchise owners want the menu to be as simple and cheap to stock as possible. Not just in terms of unique ingredients like ranch but also unique wrappers, etc. The snack wraps were always of questionable popularity in America, but they were my favourite option when I worked there.
It looks super complicated in the picture that’s shown in the article. You apparently need specialized chrome tongs to place a piece of fried chicken on a tortilla.
Gods, man, the angle of insertion is too narrow, you'll never make it!!
Not too complicated for Taco Bell, either.
Nice, now I can go back to making McCrap jokes.
McDonalds has genuinely gone to shit in my country, due to both inflation (hiked costs to eat out) but more importantly, due to major staffing shortages, which the Snack Wrap won't solve.
My local McDonalds used to be a 24/7 location pre-COVID, but nowadays they never stick to their advertised closing times (1AM on Sun - Weds and 3AM on Thurs - Sat) and the store manager doesn't really give a shit about hiring more staff. You'll be lucky to even see it open at 11PM on a Friday or Saturday. And even if they're open late, another thing they do that pisses me off is that they close the main restaurant in the evening and become a drive-thru only location, and this isn't advertised at all on their smartphone app meaning you could place a pick-up order and not be able to collect it because the restaurant is literally locked.
As you can't exactly get into the car and drive over to the McDonalds drive thru after a night out (due to drink driving being incredibly dangerous and highly illegal), your only way to order makes you reliant on Uber Eats or Deliveroo drivers, who will expect a tip because tip culture and how untipped/undertipped gig economy delivery drivers behave is pretty disgusting on these apps.
I have complained to coprorate about that restaurant a few times and they keep making excuses like "anti-social behaviour" to justify the behaviour of a shitty store manager, so it's like they don't care either.
Going back to the topic of the Snack Wrap (which is also returning to UK menus), it's not going to lead to more sales. I think their real problem is that very few of their places stay open for the late night takeaway market, and even fewer still will actually let you walk in and place an order after a night out. My local kebab houses and burger/fried chicken takeaways are far more consistent with their opening times. People have stopped going to McDonalds late at night because it's seldom open, and I think they're seriously missing out on trade.
The USA has restaurant chains like Waffle House which literally aim to maintain 24/7, 365 day service for their locations and have excellent disaster response scenarios (to the point where FEMA actually developed the Waffle House Index as a way to map the impact of extreme weather and natural disasters.) Meanwhile, McDonalds UK literally can't keep most of their restaurants open in normal circumstances...
I somehow doubt that’s be either what folks are craving or something better. Maybe it’ll be a chicken nugget in a tortilla, you can add your own sauce from a packet.
Well, the article does mention this:
So I rather doubt it.