The Globalization of “Fast Food”. Behind the Brand: McDonald’s

The Globalization of “Fast Food”. Behind the Brand: McDonald’s


The image of the McDonald label, Copyright McDonald’s 2011

This article was first published in The Ecologist

In the first of a major new series following on from the ground
breaking Behind the Label, Peter Salisbury takes a look at one of the
biggest brands in the world – McDonald’s – and asks: has the burger
giant done enough to clean-up its act?

Chances are that you have had a McDonald’s meal in the past or if
not, you certainly know a lot of people who have. It’s the biggest fast
food chain in the world, with 32,000 outlets in 117 countries. The
clown-fronted burger outfit employs a staggering 1.7 million people, and
in the first three months of 2011 alone it made $1.2bn in profits on
the back of revenues of $6.1bn. The company has come in for huge amounts
of criticism over the past 20 years, for the impact it has on the diets
of people worldwide, its labour practices and the impact its business
has had on the environment. From Fast Food Nation to Supersize Me by the way of the McLibel trials of the 1990s, plenty has been written and broadcast to tarnish the golden arches’ shine.

Declining sales in the early 2000s, which saw franchises being shut
for the first time in the company’s history, caused a major rethink of
the way McDonald’s operates, and its recent rhetoric has been that of a
firm with a newly discovered zeal for ethical end eco-friendly
practices, garnering praise from champions as unlikely as Greenpeace and the Carbon Trust. But is this just marketing hype or has McDonald’s had a genuine change of heart?

The answer is yes and no. First of all, because of the way the
company is run, it’s hard to generalise. Around 80 per cent of
McDonald’s outlets are run by franchisees who have to meet standards set
by the company, but who can – and do – go above and beyond them.
Further, McDonald’s branches are run by country and regional offices,
each of which are subject to domestic standards. The production of much
of the raw products which go into McDonald’s meals, from burger patties
to sauces, is subcontracted to different suppliers, making it impossible
to assess the company in terms of a single golden standard. Its sole
global supplier (for soft drinks) is Coca-Cola.



The UK branch of the company has certainly made great strides since the 1990s, when it became embroiled in the 1997 McLibel court case,
in which McDonald’s Corporation and McDonald’s Restaurants Limited sued
Helen Steel and Dave Morris, a former gardener and a postman, for libel
after they published a series of leaflets denouncing the company.

Exploitation

The judge overseeing the case decided that, although the pair could
not prove some of their accusations – that McDonald’s destroyed
rainforests, caused starvation in the third world or disease and cancer
in developed countries – it could be agreed that the company exploited
children, falsely advertised their food as nutritious, indirectly
sponsored cruelty to animals and paid their workers low wages: a major
blow to the brand in an age of increasing consumer-consciousness.

Since then, the UK branch has committed to a number of initiatives to
improve its image, running an aggressive marketing campaign at the same
time to portray itself as an ethical employer which is both farmer and
eco-friendly. It has also moved to become more transparent, putting ingredients lists for all of its products on its website and setting up another website, Make Up Your Own Mind, inviting customers to voice concerns and publishing accounts of critics’ visits to its production sites.

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt however. It’s not
surprising that a multibillion-dollar corporation, which has been hurt
in the past by concerns over its practices, will do its utmost to sell
itself as a reformed character. And it’s suspicious that any web search
of the company brings up a hit list of sites almost exclusively
maintained by the company.

Yet research conducted by the Ecologist shows that in many
areas the company has improved its record of ethical and environmental
awareness over the last decade. The company’s burgers, for example, are
now 100 per cent beef, and contain no preservatives or added flavours
whatsoever. All of McDonald’s UK’s burgers are provided by Germany’s Esca Food Solutions,
which claims to maintain rigorous standards at its abattoirs and
production plants, and which works closely with 16,000 independent
farmers in the UK and Ireland to maintain high standards.

‘No GM’

Since the early 2000s, McDonald’s UK has maintained that none of its
beef, bacon or chicken is fed genetically modified grain. Farmers
working for McDonald’s have independently confirmed to the Ecologist and Esca that they have a ‘decent’ working relationship with the company.



In 2007, Esca won the UK Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards for its
burgers, and in 2010 McDonald’s announced that it was launching a
three-year study into reducing the carbon emissions caused by the cattle
used in its burgers (cattle account for four per cent of the UK’s
emissions). Meanwhile, all of the fish used in Filet-O-Fish and Fish
Finger meals in Europe are sourced from sustainable fisheries certified
by the Marine Stewardship Council. Fries are largely sourced from
McCain’s, the world’s biggest potato supplier, and McDonald’s claims
that the vast majority are produced in the UK, again by independent
farmers. The fries are prepared in-store and are cooked in vegetable oil
containing no hydrogenated fats. At the beginning of the potato-growing
season, dextrose – a form of glucose – is added as a sweetener, and
salt is added after cooking (the company claims to have reduced the
amount of salt used by 23 per cent since 2008).

The bread for McDonald’s buns and muffins is sourced from a single
unnamed supplier based in Heywood, Manchester, and Banbury, Oxfordshire.
McDonald’s would not comment on where it sources the grain for the
bakeries but says once more that it does not buy genetically modified
crops. Meanwhile, the company has been working with its suppliers and
franchise-holders to make sure that they are as energy efficient as
possible. In 2010, The Carbon Trust awarded McDonald’s its Carbon Trust Standard
for reducing its overall carbon emissions by 4.5 per cent between 2007
and 2009. The company is currently experimenting with a series of energy
initiatives based around turning its waste, from packaging – which is
80 per cent recycled – to vegetable oil into energy.

Certification

Since 2007, the company – which is one of the world’s biggest coffee
retailers – has committed to selling only Rainforest Alliance certified
coffee. Although the certification body has certainly been responsible
for improving conditions and practices in many farming operations
worldwide, it has been the subject of controversy – most recently after
an undercover investigation by the Ecologist revealed allegations of sexual harassment and poor conditions for some workers at its certified Kericho tea plantation in Kenya which supplies the PG Tips brand.

Certification issues aside, McDonald’s has undoubtedly become
considerably better at taking criticism. In 2006, Greenpeace activists
stormed McDonald’s restaurants across the world dressed in chicken suits
in protest at the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which they
attributed to greedy soy producers – who in turn were selling their
produce to chicken farms, of whom McDonald’s was a major customer. They
subsequently praised the fast food chain for leading a unified response
among soy buyers, pressuring producers to adopt a ‘zero destruction’
approach to growing their crops. Despite praise from Greenpeace, the
Carbon Trust and personalities such as Jamie Oliver who have praised the
company for its ethical stance on meat and buying its produce locally,
the firm is by no means perfect.



One of the biggest incongruencies in its newly discovered zeal for
ethical practices comes from its seemingly differing approaches to the
conditions chickens live in depending on whether they produce eggs or
are used as meat in Chicken McNuggets and similar meals. The firm
proudly trumpets that its UK branch only buys eggs from Lion-certified
free-range producers, a laudable effort from a huge buyer of eggs, and
that the meat in each nugget is 100 per cent chicken breast (the final
product is around 65:35 meat and batter).

Factory farming

Yet by the same token, the company buys most of its chicken from two
suppliers, Sun Valley in the UK and Moy Park in Northern Ireland, who
are in turn owned by the controversial American firm, Cargill, and
Brazil’s Marfrig. Sun Valley has been accused of using intensive chicken
farming methods to produce their meat, which campaigners say can
typically involve birds being cooped up in giant warehouses for much of
their natural lives with barely any space to move. Sun Valley was
embroiled in a scandal in 2008 when the activist group Compassion in World Farming secretly filmed poor conditions at its supplier Uphampton Farm near Leominster.

Furthermore, although McDonald’s is happy to advertise the provenance
of its beef, dairy products and eggs, it is more circumspect about
chicken meat. This may be because up to 90 per cent of the meat it uses
in the UK is sourced from Cargill and Marfrag facilities in Thailand and
Brazil, where regulations in the farming sector are perhaps less
stringent than in the UK.

Meanwhile, the fact remains that despite attempts in recent years to
cultivate a more healthy image, McDonald’s primary sales come from fast
food in a time when there is increasing recognition that obesity has
reached epidemic proportions in the UK and the US. Although the
European, and in particular the UK arm of the company, have become
increasingly ethically aware, the same cannot be said for the US arm,
which uses livestock farmed using intensive methods and fed in some
cases on GM crops. And by buying McDonald’s in the UK, you are still
buying from the same clown.


Source:-
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-globalization-of-fast-food-behind-the-brand-mcdonald-s/25309