McDonald’s brings back fried apple pie, installs giant Route 66 display

McDonald’s brought fried apple pie back to participating U.S. restaurants on June 23, 2026, and paired the limited-time menu return with a 35-foot roadside display in Joliet, Illinois, near Route 66. The company timed both moves to America’s 250th birthday and said the giant pie, installed at 920 N Broadway St., was meant to function as a selfie stop and a commemorative roadside attraction through July 4.

The pie’s pitch leans hard on nostalgia, but its history is specific. McDonald’s says East Tennessee owner-operator Litton Cochran suggested the fried version in the 1960s, and his grandmother, Jo Cochran, spent months refining the recipe. The fried apple pie debuted in 1968, the same year McDonald’s introduced the Big Mac, and it was originally sold in a cardboard sleeve. In 1992, McDonald’s replaced the fried pie with a baked version in most of the United States as consumer concerns shifted toward fat and cholesterol.

That change never fully erased the product. McDonald’s says the fried pie stayed on menus in some international markets and in Hawaii, while the baked version remained the standard in the continental United States. The company now says the returning fried pie uses 100% American-grown apples, a detail that fits the broader marketing push around domestic production and national memory.

The Route 66 setting gives the campaign a second layer of meaning. McDonald’s chose Joliet, in its own backyard near Chicago, for the giant pie, linking the promotion to one of the country’s most durable travel corridors and to a stretch of American road culture that has long turned motor travel into an economy of stops, signs and souvenirs. The company is also pointing back to its original site in San Bernardino, California, now a museum and a landmark in the evolution of drive-in and fast-food culture.

There is a real business logic behind the spectacle. Bama Companies in Tulsa continues to make McDonald’s apple pies, including the baked version already sold in the United States, tying the revival to an existing supply chain rather than a one-off novelty. But the 35-foot pie also shows how corporate nostalgia now works as roadside branding: a familiar dessert, a famous highway and a giant object built to be photographed before the trip resumes.