Image: Adult Swim

If you went back in time to 1998 and told McDonald’s team of test kitchen chefs that the new Szechuan dipping sauce they’d just created as a promotional tie-in for the Disney movie Mulan would one day have a cult-like following, they’d probably listen to you and start hoarding bottles of the stuff to make a profit.




Assuming that you haven’t gone back in time, chances are that you haven’t tasted that sweet, tangy, blend of corn syrup, sodium, and advertising since it was in McDonald’s locations nearly 20 years ago. After hearing about the sauce’s renewed popularity thanks to Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty, McDonald’s produced three more bottles of it that were randomly given away to a trio of fans via Twitter, much to the chagrin of everyone who didn’t manage to snag one. Now, though, the fast food chain is planning on bringing the sauce back in full force for one day only.

On October 7, McDonald’s restaurants across the country will have Szechuan sauce in “limited quantities” before the sauce presumably disappears again. It’s most likely that the sauce will come in little packets like McDonald’s other dips and getting ahold of more than a couple might prove to be difficult. Now the question becomes whether one goes to McDonald’s to eat the sauce or to hoard the sauce and turn a profit when it becomes insanely rare and inexplicably valuable again.