This guy made millions by inventing the McFlurry & the $1 Menu

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, Sam, I got a Billy of the Week for you. I'm excited about it. I got goosebumps thinking about this guy. He's an inventor, he's an innovator. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison. Look, if those guys were going on a road trip, but there's only one set of keys, they would toss it to this guy. He would get to drive, and his name is Tom Ryan.
Tom Ryan is basically the Leonardo da Vinci of calories. This is a guy who has invented some of the most iconic foods in history. He invented the McGriddle. He invented stuffed crust cheese pizza. He invented smash burger, the chain. He invented the beef dip sandwich at Quiznos. His guy has just been inventing things in the food category, the McFlurry. He's just been inventing things for just decades. And he is like the godfather of food science. And so I want to tell you a little bit about this guy.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:02)
Okay, I'm interested because I didn't think that something like dipping a sandwich in au jus, I didn't think that was like an invention.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:08)
Well, okay, so some of these things, I'm using the word invention a little liberally, right? Some of them he genuinely invented, meaning like nobody had done that before. Some of it is he created that product at that company, which was not previously a product. And so sometimes it might be like, oh, well, somebody else had had the idea of a sweet sandwich. Okay, but cool, he invented the McGriddle. It's a specific thing that he invented that made it work and here's why.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:35)
Can we start by me asking, how did you even discover this? Were you like on the McGriddle Wikipedia page?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:42)
You know when you're eating something and it's so good, you're like, I'd like to pay homage. Who's the man who invented this? I'd like to put some flowers on his tombstone. That's not exactly what happened. I saw TikTok about this guy and I was like, there's no way one guy did all this.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:54)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:55)
All right, so this guy basically he goes to college and when he's at college, he has his girlfriend, the girlfriend's taking a food science class. So she convinces him to take it. He goes there and immediately falls in love. He's like, oh my God, I didn't even realize there's a whole science behind things like ketchup and ice cream, like there's literally like chemistry science, but then there's also sort of the brain science, psychology, the tongue science of like what flavors work. And so then he not only studies food science, he then gets a master's in something called lipid toxicology, right? So this guy's just studying like the science of fat. And I would say this guy is like, you know, I don't know what the equivalent of the Nobel Prize is, but for like obesity, this guy deserves it.
So he goes and he gets a job at Duncan Hines. He then works at GIF and he's like pioneering a lot of their peanut butter work that does some really great peanut butter work.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:50)
The best work.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:51)
Yeah, he's like, you know, these open AI researchers that are just getting poached from lab to lab. That was him going from Hines food lab to the GIF food lab to then he gets the call from Pizza Hut. And they recruit him as head of new products because he got this reputation. Because even at GIF, he was launching new products. And so he gets this reputation as being like this sort of mad genius. And his friend tells him when he gets the job at Pizza Hut for head of new products, he goes, dude, I'm so sorry. He's like, that's a tough position, man. Everything's already been done in pizza. Like you're doomed. You're doomed to fail. Pizza is a solved problem.
And there's a quote from him. He goes, that pissed me off. He goes, it pissed me off not because the guy was doubting me, but because a lot of the world thinks like that. They think the world is full of solved problems. I don't think like that. I think there's always an opportunity. So he goes into the research and he's doing research and he's like, all right, what do consumers care about when it comes to pizza? And he's like, all right, two things are very clear to me after studying how people eat pizza. Number one, cheese is the value driver. The more cheese, the better the cheese, the better. And there's really no limit to the amount of cheese that people are willing to have in their pizza. And second, the dogs eat the crust. He's like, the crust is the necessary part because you need a handle to hold the pizza, but it's the worst part of the pizza. People just give it to the dog. And so he's like, all right, I need to put cheese in the crust. And so he goes to his team and they're like, yeah, we'll just put some cheese on top of the crust. It'll be great. He's like, nah, it doesn't have that wow factor. He's like, we gotta have a wow factor. It's gotta feel different. It can't just be that we've added cheese to crust. It's gotta like be something that's marketable. And so he's like, let's figure out how to put cheese inside the crust, which was a whole like physics problem because, you know, he's like the first one he made like that. He's like, it tasted pretty good, but it looked like a, like a bike tire. Like I burned the whole outer crust. It was like this fat, you know, like burnt thing. And so he had to figure out how do you cook the pizza so that you can have gooey cheese in the crust without burning the crust. And so he does some work and they figure it out. They get a special dough and a special pan. And then they get it to work and it becomes this huge hit. But then he's also a marketing genius. And so he creates, he's like, you know what? We don't need to do something new. What we need to do is, have you ever seen this Malcolm Gladwell talk that he gives as his big Ted Talk about the perfect pastas? Have you seen this?