McDonald's Begins Selling Red Bull Nationwide, Because the Drive-Thru Was Always the Point

OAK BROOK, Ill. — Starting today, you can get a Red Bull at McDonald’s. The American public, which has been waiting for this since 1997, responded at the drive-thru window with a single word: “Large.”

The drink is called the Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer, made with Red Bull energy drink, blue raspberry syrup, and freeze-dried dragon fruit, and it is arriving in restaurants nationwide on what the company calls “a new era of McDonald’s drinks.” It is also arriving alongside a new Vanilla Swirl Coke and a line of reduced-sugar “crafted sodas,” which means the McDonald’s drink menu has, in the span of a single afternoon, gone from “a fountain of sodas” to “a beverage R&D lab.”

The Dragonberry is, by all accounts, purple in a way that requires explanation. It is the color of a bruise that has given up. It is the color of a phone case from 2014. According to at least one customer at a location in Florida, it has “its own gravitational pull.”

The rollout has, by the company’s own account, already happened, which is a phrase that has appeared in fast-food corporate communications before but has never been quite so true. Certain locations, it turns out, have been selling the drink since as early as August 5, two weeks before the official launch, and the company has characterized the early rollout as “the menu arriving where the demand was.” The demand, for the record, was a drive-thru in the Carolinas and a handful of employees who posted about it before being asked not to.

The corporate statement, for those who collect them, contains the phrase “more fuel.” “Whether you’re looking for more fuel or more choices,” the statement reads, “power into a new era of McDonald’s drinks.” The words “more fuel” in a McDonald’s press release have, for the first time in corporate history, been used without apology, and the drive-thru has, in the words of one shift supervisor, “become what it always was supposed to be: a service station for the American afternoon.”

The customers, for their part, have a system. A high school junior in Ohio described his order as “two Dragonberries and a Happy Meal,” and when asked about the Happy Meal said, “the Happy Meal is for the kid I was.” A parent in Arizona said she was getting one for herself and “telling my son it’s a vitamin smoothie,” which is the family arrangement that the Dragonberry was, in a sense, engineered for. A cardiologist who asked for his name not to be used, because “my patients need me to stay credible,” said the drink was “a lifestyle choice,” which is the medical community’s way of saying “it’s not my job.”

At press time, the company had announced it was “exploring a chicken-and-fries pairing with the Dragonberry,” calling it, in the words of a corporate spokesperson, “the ultimate fuel pairing,” and the FDA had confirmed it was “monitoring the situation,” which is what the FDA always says.