Kids’ Nutrition

The Happy Meal® has been enjoyed by families around the world for decades, bringing people together to share moments and create lasting memories. Just as every family around the world is different, our Happy Meal changes with them.

A Happy Meal makes it fun for our youngest guests to enjoy some wholesome options. We began evolving the Happy Meal in the U.S. in 2004, when we started offering choices like Apple Dippers, milk and apple juice in select markets. In 2012, we began automatically including Apple Slices in every Happy Meal.

Since then, we’ve continued to make changes to items in the Happy Meal, such as removing artificial preservatives from our Chicken McNuggets® and hamburgers (except the pickle, which contains an artificial preservative, so customers can skip it if they’d like).

We know that chocolate milk has been a longtime favorite in the Happy Meal. In early 2020, we introduced a reduced sugar, low-fat chocolate milk that contains 25% less sugar than leading quick service restaurants’ low-fat chocolate milk*.

* 14g of sugar vs. avg. 23g at leading quick service restaurants

Since 2013, we have been working with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a third-party nonprofit organization, to evolve the Happy Meal menu and use our size and scale to offer more balanced choices for kids.

As part of this work, we removed soda from U.S. menu boards in 2014, resulting in a 15% increase in the number of Happy Meal orders served with milk, water or juice drink between 2013 and 2018.

In 2018, we announced ambitious Global Happy Meal Goals with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation that continue our focus on Happy Meals. Since 2018, we’ve sold over 2.5 billion Happy Meal items containing fruit, vegetable, low fat dairy, water, lean protein or whole grains across our 20 major markets**.

**The 20 major markets include: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.