The man who created the Big Mac has died aged 98

He died at his home in Pittsburgh Monday night.

At first, Delligatti’s idea of serving a bigger burger was not taken on board. It was introduced across the USA a year later.

McDonald’s franchisee Jim Delligatti created the Big Mac and debuted it in the mid-1960’s at his Uniontown, Pennsylvania restaurant.

An estimated 900 million Big Macs are sold around the world every year.

In 1967, Michael “Jim” Delligatti came up with the formula of having two lots of everything – beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and special sauce – in one burger.

A point of pride for Delligatti was that he never made his famous secret sauce recipe public.

“He was often asked why he named it the Big Mac, and he said because Big Mc sounded too amusing, ” his son Michael Delligatti said.

“I felt that we needed a big sandwich”, he said. The Big Mac “has gotten less relevant”, a top McDonald’s franchisee wrote in a memo to other operators in July.

Delligatti’s culinary inventiveness also spread to the McDonald’s breakfast menu, which he was involved in creating.

After 1967, Delligatti went on to run 48 McDonald’s branches, making him one of the biggest franchisees in the company. A cultural icon, the burger was celebrated in innumerable works of art, perhaps most famously as Le Big Mac in Quentin Tarntino’s Pulp Fiction.

Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition and public health professor, wrote in an email: “The Big Mac has had an enormous influence on American – and global – eating patterns, not all to the good alas”.

Delligatti did not receive royalties or payments for inventing the sandwich.

Michael James Delligatti was born on August 2, 1918, in Uniontown. He attended school in Uniontown and Fairmont, W.Va., and served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II.

He first learned about McDonald’s during a restaurant trade show, and started his business back in 1956.

Delligatti’s creation has become an enduring icon, arguably as recognizable as Ronald McDonald himself.