McDonald's Switzerland sells the first single McNugget, solving the sharing theorem

Since Chicken McNuggets appeared in 1983, fans have joked about the 'Chicken McNugget Theorem': with classic pack sizes, some quantities can never be ordered and no box divides evenly across every number of diners, so somebody always loses the last nugget. McDonald's Switzerland and TBWA\Switzerland decided to take the joke literally for the menu item's 40th birthday.

On December 5, 2023 the brand became the first in the world to sell individual Chicken McNuggets. Dubbed the 'Chicken McNuggets of Love', the single nugget cost CHF 1.20 while a four-piece box was CHF 4.80, and it was available in every Swiss restaurant for a limited time. A nationwide teaser campaign presented the maths as deadpan lesson material — showing that not every number of nuggets matches every number of people at the table — before revealing that the solution was a single, orderable nugget.

The stunt paid off commercially: Effie Switzerland recorded the strongest snack-sales month in the company's local history, with Chicken McNugget sales up 25% and snack-category sales up 10.5%, plus around CHF 960,000 in earned media as the story crossed into US news. In May 2025 the campaign collected a Webby Award in the Best Launch & Drop category, the agency's first Webby.

The idea worked because it turned a shared complaint into a product change rather than a punchline: the constraint the audience had been joking about for decades — that sharing maths never works out — was removed with a one-nugget SKU, letting every customer order the exact number their table needed.