Former McDonald's Chef Dishes on the Best McMuffin Dupes From the Grocery Store

Mike Haracz is a former corporate chef for McDonald's who has amassed a sizable following on TikTok thanks to his insightful videos on some of the company's inner workings. Some of his most-watched videos are ones where he explains where to find items at the grocery store that are similar to those you can order off the menu at the Golden Arches. And while these dupes might not be the exact products that the fast food giant uses in their food preparation, they often get you close enough to the real thing.

If you want to recreate the popular McMuffin breakfast item, though, you might be out of luck. Haracz explained in a recent TikTok that a perfect copy of McMuffins will likely be hard or impossible to find at the grocery store because the company is so big that it makes their own muffins rather than go to an outside retailer to provide them.

"[If] you sell a certain amount of a thing, and depending on what that thing is, there's a different threshold where you have enough buying power and the finances make sense where you could get a customized version of a thing," he said. "If you're an entrepreneur who only has one restaurant, you are probably not getting a food manufacturer to run you millions of pounds of a thing that will allow you to get a customized option."

"McDonald's is so large, they are not going to any store, any place where they [say], 'Ah, let me get that one,'" he pointed out plainly. "They are usually getting a customized thing, unless it is some kind of brand partnership, like Oreos for Oreo McFlurries."

"So, you're probably not going to be able to find the exact item," he concluded. "A lot of supermarket chains like to knock off the popular item so you might be able to find that style of muffin somewhere in the refrigerated section."

He broke down this McMuffin phenomenon in a previous TikTok posted in August 2023 and confirmed that the company is likely having its own McMuffins custom-made for its restaurants. But he also gave a pro tip for anyone looking to make their own McMuffins at home.

"If you do want your English muffin to kind of taste like how McDonald's does it, [then] broil it on one side," he advised. "Normally, you're putting an English muffin in a toaster and it toasts both sides. Well, the toasters at McDonald's only brown one side of the English muffin, so you're going to want to just broil one side, making that side crispy and the other side soft."

Whatever you like to have for breakfast, just make sure you don't skip it.