I don’t think any other country treats a burger condiment the way we treat Big Mac sauce. We’ve bought it in tubs, queued for it in bottles, bid thousands of dollars on it for charity, and chanted a jingle at a Maccas counter to get a free Coke to go with it. Somewhere along the way, the sauce became more interesting to us than the burger it came on. As far as I can tell, Australia has quietly become the Big Mac sauce capital of the world, and for some reason, I’ve ended up putting together what might be the world’s most in-depth look at this phenomenon.
The sauce has always been more interesting than the burger for me, because I don’t actually like Big Macs. There’s too much bread and not enough meat, so if I’m getting a beef burger, it’s usually some kind of Quarter Pounder. The sauce is a different story. Most of it ends up on my chicken nuggets and fries, which as you’ll see, has been going on for a while.
I’m pretty sure my sister introduced me to the idea of getting it on the side when she started working at Maccas.
Big Mac Sauce in a Cup: The Old Maccas Secret
She worked there from 2007 to 2010. Growing up, if you ordered nuggets or fries, you picked from the usual dipping sauces like BBQ or sweet and sour. As a kid, BBQ was always my favourite, and I’ve always thought sweet and sour was a bit overrated. If you asked the staff what sauces they had, they’d only list the ones that came prepackaged. I don’t think anyone was guarding it as a secret. Most of them probably just didn’t think of it, or didn’t care enough to go out of their way. Big Mac sauce only came on the burger, so as far as most people knew, that was the only way to get it. That was a problem for me, because I’ve never been much of a ketchup guy, and my fries needed something.
I believe it was McChicken sauce my sister used to get on the side, squirted from the sauce gun into one of those little plastic cups with the lid pressed on by hand. It wasn’t a sealed tub with a peel-back lid, just whatever came out of the sauce gun. But it meant you could ask for almost any of the sauces they used on the burgers in a cup, and that’s what got me onto Big Mac sauce. By then I’d finished school, which means my entire childhood and high school years were wasted not knowing there were more sauces available than just the basics.
Big Mac sauce and McChicken sauce were the two I cared about at the time. You can also get aioli and tartare. I’ve never bothered with the aioli, and I only tried the tartare recently. Big Mac sauce with fries and nuggets is the whole point.
Back then, it felt like insider knowledge. Before online ordering, nobody could scroll through every option McDonald’s had. You ordered from the menu board, and if something wasn’t on it, you had to know to ask. Having a sister behind the counter helped.
The Epic Meal Time Fast Food Lasagna
If you were on YouTube around 2011, you probably remember Epic Meal Time. A group of guys cooked absurd amounts of fast food and bacon, poured Jack Daniel’s into everything, and put a calorie counter on screen. I only found out while writing this that they were Canadian, from Montreal. I’d always assumed they were American.
Their Fast Food Lasagna was one of the big ones. Instead of pasta sheets, it used layers of whole burgers: 15 Big Macs, 15 Wendy’s Baconators, and 15 A&W Teen Burgers, with bacon, cheese, onion rings and roughly a litre of Big Mac sauce in between.
Naturally, a big group of my friends decided we had to make it, and we didn’t wait long. The video went up on 26 April 2011, and just 11 days later, on 7 May, we were all at a friend’s house pooling our money. The first problem was that we didn’t have Wendy’s or A&W here in Australia, so we swapped in burgers from Hungry Jack’s, which also sold the onion rings we needed. The second problem was the Big Mac sauce.
In the video, they walk into McDonald’s and come out with what looked like a large soft drink cup full of Big Mac sauce. If I remember right, it cost them about ten dollars. I’d always assumed that was US dollars, but it would have been Canadian.
Our local Maccas in Werribee wouldn’t do anything like that. What we got instead was a dozen or more of those little plastic cups, each with one miserable pump of sauce in it.
You can see them lined up next to the Hungry Jack’s onion rings, along with the bags of cheese and the bacon still wrapped in butcher’s paper. Most of those cups have barely anything in them. Whoever was working that night was definitely being a jerk about our order.
We still made the lasagna. With so little sauce spread across that many burgers, I doubt we could even taste it in the final product. What I do know is there was a stupid amount of plastic waste involved.
How to Get a Lot of Big Mac Sauce at Once
If you need Big Mac sauce by the litre rather than the pump, McDonald’s still isn’t much help. Outside the occasional limited-edition bottle, the only official way is buying tub after tub.
So it was a relief to find out about Woolworths Secret Burger Sauce. It’s been on the shelves for years now, and it’s apparently meant to be pretty similar. A 330ml squeeze bottle is around $2.95, which seems crazy cheap. I counted about 20 of those little cups in our lasagna photo, and if we paid something like 50 cents each, that’s roughly $10 for what was probably a few spoonfuls of sauce. The same $10 today would get you three bottles of the Woolies stuff, which is just under a litre. That’s about what Epic Meal Time used.
There’s also Heinz Special Burger Sauce, which comes in a slightly smaller 295ml bottle. It’s normally $5, but it was on special for $3.75 when I checked, so it’s still a lot cheaper than a pile of little tubs. It’s made in New Zealand rather than here, but I don’t think that’s going to stop anyone.
On paper, both are fairly close to Big Mac sauce. They all start with oil, and they all have gherkin, vinegar, egg and mustard. The Woolworths version adds dill, which I don’t think Big Mac sauce has, while the Heinz one has garlic, which my old 2019 bottle of Big Mac sauce listed too. I honestly can’t remember whether I’ve tried either of them, so I’ll have to pick up a bottle of each soon and do a proper side-by-side test. And if I ever attempt the Fast Food Lasagna again, I know which aisle I’m starting in.
When McDonald’s Australia Started Selling Big Mac Sauce Tubs
The funny part is that, officially, McDonald’s didn’t sell Big Mac sauce on its own until years after my sister showed me the cup trick.
In February 2015, McDonald’s Australia started selling 25ml tubs of Special Sauce for 50 cents. The company said we were the first country in the world to get them. The marketing boss at the time said customers were always asking where they could buy it, which I can believe.
The tubs went to 920 restaurants with 600 tubs each, and I knew the suburban stores would sell out almost immediately. So I drove out to a highway-side McDonald’s instead, figuring most people wouldn’t bother going that far out of their way. It worked, and I came home with one or two tubs.
I kept one sealed for years. In 2015 the tubs were clear plastic, unlike the white ones you get today, so you could see the sauce inside, and I kept it in the fridge so it wouldn’t end up looking rancid. Sadly I can’t find it anywhere now, and I suspect someone threw it out without realising what it was.
So officially, the tubs were brand new. Unofficially, plenty of us had been getting it in cups for years.
Big Mac Sauce Bottles and the eBay Frenzy
At the same time as the 2015 tubs, McDonald’s made 200 limited-edition 500ml bottles. It put bottle number one on eBay for Ronald McDonald House Charities, and it sold for $20,600 after 134 bids. That’s a lot of money for mayonnaise and relish, even for a good cause.
In January 2016, McDonald’s Australia sold 4,000 bottles for under five dollars each from a small number of stores, and they were gone in about 15 minutes. Within minutes, some of them were listed on Gumtree for as much as $100. I have no idea whether anyone actually paid that, and I suspect most of those listings never sold. A few weeks later, the UK auctioned a single bottle, and the auction ended with a winning bid of £65,900. McDonald’s said at the time it was still checking whether that bid was genuine, and I couldn’t find out if it was ever paid. Either way, I think that settles which country got the better deal.
For the Big Mac’s 50th anniversary in 2018, McDonald’s went further. It auctioned a Big Mac mini fridge with three bottles inside. Then it released 100,000 bottles at $12 each in restaurants nationwide.
In 2019, it did it again for McHappy Day, this time with more than 144,000 bottles at $12 each, with the proceeds going to charity. I bought one, along with a pair of the Big Mac socks they were selling for $5, and wrote about it at the time. One detail I liked was that the serving size on the bottle was 25ml, the same as a regular sauce tub.
That bottle is still sitting unopened in my fridge, more than six years past its February 2020 best before date. That’s not an accident. I’ve been quite militant about making sure it survives, because at this point it’s basically a family heirloom. Anyone who stays at my place gets a warning not to touch it.
Onion Rings With Big Mac Sauce
In April 2024, McDonald’s brought back the Mac Family, so we had the Mac Jr., the Grand Big Mac, and Onion Rings served with Big Mac Special Sauce. When onion rings were on the menu back in 2021, they came with BBQ sauce instead. I think pairing them with Big Mac sauce this time was McDonald’s quietly admitting what a lot of us had been doing for years anyway.
The same promotion also included the Big Mac Challenge. If you could recite the old “two all beef patties” chant in four seconds or less, you got free small fries and a Coke. I can’t think of another country where you could run a promotion like that and expect grown adults to take part at the counter.
Big Mac sauce has stayed on the menu since then. Strangely, the McDonald’s Australia website lists both a Big Mac Dipping Sauce and a separate Big Mac Special Sauce, and I’m not sure what the difference is.
Big Mac Sauce Today: Sealed Tub or Cardboard Cup?
The cup trick isn’t much of a secret anymore. Open the MyMacca’s app and Big Mac sauce is sitting near the top of the condiments list, pictured in its sealed tub, for 85 cents. That’s up from 50 cents for the 2015 tubs, which feels fair enough for 11 years. It sits alongside ranch, spicy buffalo, sweet ‘n sour, barbecue, mustard, ketchup, aioli, McChicken sauce and tartare.
For a while, Big Mac sauce came in its own sealed tub with Big Mac artwork on the lid, and I assumed that meant it had finally become a proper condiment. The tub on the left is from only a week or two ago, when I was out at Highpoint for my article on the old Highpoint Shopping Centre. But when I ordered it the night before I started writing this, it came out of the sauce gun again, this time into a new cardboard cup with a red Big Mac Sauce sticker on top. For a moment, I wasn’t sure the sealed tub was here to stay.
So I asked my friend Jemma, who knows a couple of people working at the Frankston McDonald’s. According to one of them, the only sauces they put into cups by hand are McChicken, tartare and Tomato Chilli Jam. Everything else, Big Mac sauce included, is meant to come in its own sealed packet. So the sealed tub seems to be the normal one now, and my cardboard cup was probably from a store that had run out.
My next order backed that up. I got McChicken sauce and tartare sauce, and both came in the same cardboard cups. I’d never tried the tartare before, because I don’t eat fish, and I think it’s generally only used on the Filet-O-Fish, so I’d otherwise never have a reason to get it. It turned out to be a bit of a middle ground between Big Mac sauce and McChicken sauce, and overall better than the McChicken sauce, which didn’t have much taste to it.
I hadn’t noticed Tomato Chilli Jam in the app when I first checked, but it’s since turned up as a featured condiment. It’s the new dip that came in with the Mozzarella Sticks promotion. Like most of the sauces in my collection, I doubt it will be around for long, so if you want to try it, I wouldn’t wait.
Did McDonald’s Change the Big Mac Sauce Recipe?
I think so, at least on paper. McDonald’s publishes an ingredients and nutrition document, and its change log mentions Big Mac, McChicken and Tartare Sauce formulation updates. The back of my 2019 bottle lists soybean oil first, then water and pickle relish, and it was made here in Australia by McCormick Foods. The current version starts with vegetable oil, then a sweet relish made with diced gherkin, then water and mustard. I’m not sure if the bottled stuff was exactly the same as what went on the burgers back then, but it’s the closest thing to a before-and-after comparison I’ve got.
The way it’s served has changed too. For decades, the sauce arrived at restaurants in sealed canisters and was dispensed with a calibrated sauce gun. In 2023, McDonald’s started introducing a new dispenser that squeezes soft bags of sauce with a plunger. That calibrated sauce gun was built to give exactly one burger’s worth per pull, which might explain the “one miserable pump” we got in Werribee. Judging by our photo, though, some of those cups didn’t even get that.
I’d be lying if I said I could taste the difference. But if you’ve felt that Big Mac sauce tastes a bit different lately, the paperwork suggests you’re not imagining it.
My McDonald’s Sauce Tub Collection
I’ve started keeping the more interesting tubs, and everything in this photo is reasonably recent. My missing 2015 tub would have been the pride of it, and the clear plastic would have stood out next to all these white ones.
A few are regulars you can order any day, like Big Mac Sauce, Sweet ‘N Sour, Sweet Mustard, Barbecue, Aioli, Ranch, Hotcake Syrup and a ketchup packet for completeness, even if I’m not a ketchup guy. The rest came from limited-time promotions. The Cajun and Sweet Chili tubs, labelled in Korean, came with the BTS Meal in 2021. Szechuan and Curry were part of a run of limited-edition McNugget sauces in 2022, and the Special Edition Gold sauce came over from McDonald’s in the USA. There’s also Frank’s RedHot Buffalo, Korean BBQ, a Loki-branded Sweet ‘N Sour and a Minecraft Nether Flame sauce. The two Big Mac tubs are the regular one, designed to look like the burger itself, and the yellow FIFA World Cup 26 tub with a football sitting in the Golden Arches.
I should actually have two Szechuan sauces. McDonald’s has brought it back a few times since it first appeared in 1998 for Mulan, and Rick and Morty turned it into a cult item. My sister picked me up some in Hawaii during one of the early US releases, and I got another one when it finally came out here. I think the one in the photo is the newer Australian one, so the Hawaiian one is probably hiding with the rest of the collection.
There are a few recent ones I missed, too. The most obvious is Monica’s Marinara from the Friends Meal earlier this year. It wasn’t rare or hard to get by any means. I just didn’t eat much McDonald’s during that promotion and forgot all about it until it was gone.
A Global Timeline of Big Mac Sauce Promotions
Once I started lining up every time McDonald’s has sold Big Mac sauce on its own, a pattern jumped out. Australia usually gets it first, and everyone else gets it later, often only for a few weeks.
2012: The Recipe Goes Public
McDonald’s executive chef Dan Coudreaut posted a video of the recipe on YouTube: store-bought mayonnaise, sweet relish, mustard, vinegar, garlic powder, onion powder and paprika. It took away some of the mystery, but I don’t think it made anyone want the real thing any less.
2015: Australia Gets the World’s First Tubs
In February, McDonald’s Australia started selling 25ml tubs for 50 cents and said we were the first country in the world to get them. At the same time, it auctioned bottle #1 of 200 on eBay for charity.
2016: Bottles in Australia, One Very Expensive Bottle in the UK
In January, 4,000 bottles went on sale in Australia and sold out in about 15 minutes. A few weeks later, the UK auctioned one bottle, which ended with a winning bid of £65,900.
2017: America and Canada Catch Up (Sort Of)
In January, McDonald’s USA gave away 10,000 numbered bottles to promote the Grand Mac and Mac Jr. People queued for them, and some were soon listed on eBay for hundreds of dollars, although I couldn’t find out whether any of them actually sold. In March, McDonald’s Canada announced that Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish and McChicken sauces were heading to supermarket shelves. As far as I know, that’s something we still haven’t had here.
2018: The Big Mac Turns 50 in Australia
For the 50th anniversary, McDonald’s Australia auctioned a Big Mac mini fridge with three bottles inside. It then released 100,000 bottles at $12 each nationwide.
2019: McHappy Day Bottles
Australia got more than 144,000 bottles at $12, with the profits going to Ronald McDonald House Charities.
2020: The UK’s First Pots
In February, McDonald’s UK sold 50ml pots of Big Mac sauce for 50p, calling it the first time ever that customers could order extra sauce. That was five years after our tubs.
2023: Canada and the US Get Dipping Cups
McDonald’s Canada offered Big Mac sauce dipping cups from February until early March. Canada’s tub uses the same Big Mac artwork as ours, just with the label in both English and French.
In April, the US launched Big Mac sauce dip cups for a limited time, but only through the app. They came in retro blue and silver packaging, and McDonald’s treated it like the big reveal of a secret, which is funny when you’ve been dipping nuggets in the stuff since the 2000s.
2024: Onion Rings With Big Mac Sauce
In April, Australia’s Mac Family promotion paired Onion Rings with Big Mac Special Sauce. Big Mac sauce has since become a regular item on the Australian condiments menu.
2026: Secret Menus and the World Cup
In January, McDonald’s UK launched its first official Secret Menu, with Big Mac sauce as a dip for 20p, again for a limited time. In June, the FIFA World Cup 26 promotion put specially packaged Big Mac sauce on menus around the world. We got the gold-packaged version. The UK sold a specially packaged dip for 30p, and Canada got the same gold sauce. Both Australia and Canada also had collectible drink cups featuring players like David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Lamine Yamal, plus Grimace. Ours came with Large meals in six designs, while Canada had seven, with its captain Alphonso Davies added to the line-up.
Looking at all of that together, I think Australians have been pretty spoiled when it comes to Big Mac sauce. I’m not sure any other country has had as many goes at buying it on its own as we have. I doubt McDonald’s keeps doing it out of generosity, though. It must come down to popular demand, and back in 2015 McDonald’s Australia said as much, admitting people were always asking where they could buy it. I also haven’t found another country where it’s a permanent menu item, but I’d love to be corrected.
Why Are Aussies So Obsessed With Big Mac Sauce?
I think part of it is that the sauce is what makes a Big Mac taste like a Big Mac. Take it away and you have a fairly ordinary double cheeseburger with some lettuce and an extra piece of bread, which to me is the burger’s problem anyway. The sauce is the only part I’d miss. Early on, it also helped that Big Mac sauce felt like McDonald’s answer to KFC’s 11 herbs and spices. McDonald’s called it “special sauce”, but everyone else called it the secret sauce, and I don’t think many people knew exactly what was in it. That changed in 2012, when McDonald’s own executive chef posted a video showing how to make it at home.
That home recipe has been out there ever since, but I’ve never bothered making it. It’s a good sauce, but I’m not that desperate. I suspect plenty of people feel the same way, especially now that you can just add a tub to your order for 85 cents.
The last part is that McDonald’s has spent more than a decade teasing Australians with it. Limited tubs, limited bottles, charity auctions, gold packaging. Every time something is only available for a short time, we go a bit silly.
My boys love nuggets, but they don’t like any of the sauces, so their nugget orders come with sauces they won’t touch. That’s part of how my collection has grown so much lately, on top of my older limited-edition hunts. They’re still at childcare, so maybe they’ll come around one day. If they do, I’ll pass on the cup trick the way my sister did for me, although the app will have beaten me to it.
From what I can tell, the sealed Big Mac sauce tub now appears to be a permanent menu item in Australia, and the cardboard cups seem to be what stores fall back on when they’ve run out of tubs. I hope it stays that way, because the amount of sauce you get in a squirted cup can be quite hit or miss, as our lasagna attempt proved, while the tubs are the same every time.
Did you know about the Big Mac sauce cup trick before the app made it easy? Did you ever manage to get one of the bottles? Let me know on Facebook.
