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A McDonald’s executive takes you inside the viral Grimace Shake trend and how the burger giant dealt with it

Fast Company 01 May 2026 2h ago
A McDonald’s executive takes you inside the viral Grimace Shake trend and how the burger giant dealt with it
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Relevance
18/25
Freshness
8/25
Authority
25/20
Brand Signal
9/15
Depth
4/15
Relevance Freshness Authority Brand Depth
For those who don’t remember what life on the internet looked like in 2023, here’s a refresher: girl dinner, the Roman Empire, and a TikTok algorithm painted purple from the McDonald’s Grimace Shake. The trend was simple, albeit strange: Users would film themselves trying out the purple McDonald’s beverage and then immediately cut to a horror-movie scene of their staged death . The purple vanilla-
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