Success Quote by Jim Cantalupo

Cantalupo’s line is corporate judo: he takes the most photogenic accusation against McDonald’s and flips it back onto the accuser. The phrasing does two jobs at once. “The fact of the matter is” performs authority, a boardroom throat-clear that signals numbers are coming and feelings should exit the room. Then he drops the statistic - “less than five per cent” - not to illuminate the business, but to shrink the moral panic down to a rounding error. It’s an appeal to proportion dressed up as transparency.

The subtext is tighter: McDonald’s isn’t just defending a menu option; it’s defending the legitimacy of consumer choice. By stressing that supersizing is rare, he’s implying it’s elective, even quirky, and therefore unfair to treat as emblematic of the brand. That’s why the second sentence matters more than the first. “That’s never mentioned” frames critics as selective narrators, people who need a villain more than they need accuracy.

The kicker - “The whole issue has been supersized itself” - is a neat bit of brand-literate rhetoric. He borrows the company’s own language to suggest media and public health critics are indulging in excess: inflating a marginal practice into a cultural crisis. In the early-2000s backdrop of mounting obesity concerns and the coming wave of fast-food documentaries and lawsuits, the quote reads as preemptive damage control: concede nothing about the system, concede only that the conversation is overheated. It’s not a denial; it’s a reframing engineered to make scrutiny look like hysteria.