McDonald's Mozzarella Stick Predicament

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If you've ordered fried mozzarella sticks in a diner, trendy restaurant (Chili's, T.G.I. Fridays, Applebee's etc) or even a hole in the wall pizza shop then you know there's always a chance that one or more of them are going to be 'empty'. Don't claim ignorance; you knew there was a chance of it happening. First you need to look at the cheese they are using. McDonald's say it is 100% mozzarella cheese but I have a hard time believing that because of the cost price of 'real' authentic mozzarella cheese. Sure, grocery stores might have sliced mozzarella cheese on sale for $4.99 a pound but we aren't talking about that kind of cheese. McDonald's buys in bulk then has things sent to processing plants so the breadcrumbs, cheese, flour and spices are all coming from different places to be assembled into – you guessed it – mozzarella sticks. It's 100% automated to ensure a final product that looks amazing. No one cares about taste because once a consumer sees it they aren't going to care. To cement the deal, throw them a dipping cup of sodium-laden marinara sauce and they will be hooked. SIDE NOTE: I am sure that initially they wanted to make their own cheese so they could hide the actual ingredients and claim it is a "propriety formula" but some lawyer with a soul probably stepped in and said that it wasn't as cut and dry as that. My prediction, McDonald's is going to hang someone at a corporate office for this and that person isn't going to have a clue why they are being hung out to dry. Listen, there aren't a lot of things that I claim to know about to an almost embarrassing extent but cheese is one of them. Whether it's making it, preserving it, serving it or pairing it with a wine – I know cheese and I can guarantee to McDonald's was not using 100% mozzarella cheese. To start with you need to use whole milk and that isn't cheap. A gallon of Vitamin D milk (red top / red label) here is $4.50 a gallon but again, we are dealing with bulk amounts of milk and I am sure that they are not using whole milk (and if they are it's stuff that's close to being dated). Then there are the other things you will need like rennet and citric acid and any coloring that may be added. If there is a high water content then when you go to fry it you are going to have the sides bust out from the water molecules expanding. That is where the flash freezing process comes into play. The cheese is processed then air-forced into a pressurized tube; it is extruded into a long almost endless rectangular 'string'. That's when another machine starts cutting the cooled off cheese pieces. It's then that they are broken into 150 piece batches and are coated with seven different ingredients starting with flour. If you tried to get the breadcrumb mixture to stick to the cheese without the flour as a buffer you would have a large festering blob of melted cheese and burned breadcrumbs in your oil. So now you know how they are made but you still wonder what happened to the cheese that was previously inside the breadcrumb tube. Well, they used cheap cheese and basically it dissolved when it stated to heat up. It’s the equivalent of trying to deep fry those cute little pizza pockets only to have half of them bust open and leak the contents into the frying pan or deep fryer. That's why there are toaster ovens kids. McDonald's assumed that no one would complain about the lack of cheese inside the sticks; I am sure that the first two initial runs yielded a much better product and that's routine for companies to do to get people hooked on things that they are trying to work into their standard menu. Once people have tried it and give it the thumbs up they start cranking out the inferior versions. Cheaper ingredients, more profit. So it's a bait and switch but this time it worked against them because shipments were not sent out correctly so the initial batches of the higher quality mozzarella sticks were not sent out when they should have been. Stores either got an entire pallet of the cheap sticks or a mix of the top shelf and low quality versions. The whispers of a class action lawsuit can be heard at the edges of the interwebs; don't expect to get rich off of it because chances are all you will get is a coupon for $5.00 worth of McDonald's food – which in the real world comes out to about $3.27 of actual edible food. If you got empty mozzarella sticks, would you complain? Which restaurant / food joint has the best mozzarella sticks? Are you shocked that this happened considering the price 3/$1.00)?