McDonald's offers burgers made with fresh beef, sales soar

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/24/mcdonalds-offers-burgers-mad.html

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“Your burger was made with 100% hydraulically reclaimed facial slurry; but, at least it was frozen! Mmmm! Taste those fresh, tasty, cow-lips.”

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Now we know where the striking workers are disappearing too.

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I love eating their burgers. Thank you for such hygienic product.

Why? I’d be happier with frozen. With fresh ones, there’s the risk that some cost-cutting type might be tempted to use burgers that really should have been thrown out by now.

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It’s the “separate ships and separate pipes” to final processing that’s the hard part of knowing. See below from a 2014 piece on sustainability via GreenBiz:

One big challenge is traceability — the ability to track meat as it moves along the value chain and is combined with other meat to create finished hamburger patties. Some countries have animal identification programs. A cow within the European Union is given an ear tag and an ID number nearly as soon as it is born. An E.U. database tracks the cows throughout their lives, and then some. Not so in the United States and many other countries.

Therefore, it’s unlikely that a given batch of hamburger patties will have the required traceability to ensure that every ounce of beef comes from ranches or processors that meet the GRSB standard. That will be especially true early on as the industry ramps up; it could take a decade before a critical mass of certified sustainable beef is on the market. So, if McDonald’s can’t easily slap a sustainability logo on a box of patties — let alone a Happy Meal — it may need to find alternative ways to tell its sustainable beef story to the marketplace.

The company may find lessons in the sustainable palm oil market, where there’s a certificate-trading program for certified palm oil, similar to carbon credits used in greenhouse gas reduction efforts. The GreenPalm option allows growers certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil to convert their certified oil into certificates, which are traded on the GreenPalm Market.

“Product manufacturers who use palm, palm kernel oil or any palm-based derivative and fraction in their products then place offers for these certificates, offsetting their physical oil with the equivalent amount of certificates,” explains the RSPO website.

If that sentence makes your head spin, McDonald’s Yagan offered a simpler explanation to GreenPalm: “You get to support the right practices with your market power, but you didn’t have to pay for all the extra infrastructure of separate ships and separate pipes.”

https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/01/07/inside-mcdonalds-quest-sustainable-beef

Still doesn’t explain the origin of “Special Sauce”.

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…lolwut

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If history is any indicator he will post spam soon after a few more comments like that on other threads

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IMO, the fresh, not frozen, is why Wendy’s is so damn good.

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McDonald’s is pretty familiar with their own supply chain and can forecast menu item demand within a fraction of a percentage during any given hour.

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A long long time ago . . . I was a night-shift cleaner at McDonald’s.
Don’t eat there. Just don’t.

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I just happen to be eating a Wendy’s burger right now.

Their value meals are hard to pass up when they’re right across the street from the workplace!

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Are people still eating fast fude?

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My job in High School was with the late shift to cleanup crew at a McDonalds. Their standards were pretty stringent. We had to scrub and use cleanser on every surface every night. Everything had to be sparkling for the morning crew. Floors had to be mopped. The only thing we didn’t handle was the milkshake machine and the front counter–that was front counter crew. They were kind of lazy and just told people the milkshake machine was broken because they didn’t want to clean it.

The job I hated the most was draining, scrubbing, and refilling the fry machines. They were still blazing hot and the gloves we had to wear were well past their service life. Stuff that burns on the side of a fry machine is a bitch and a half to clean off.

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Can confirm that their ‘fresh’ Quarter Pounders are a definite upgrade from the tasteless, pointless beef in the regular burgers.

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I always thing of Rudy Rucker when I see reference of “Wendy Burgers”.

I love it when people try to deny that McDonald’s food is tasty. Is it good for you? Heck no. But the stuff is engineered to tick all the boxes of what humans find delicious.

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I consider it like donuts, OK once in awhile.

I do like Egg McMuffins.

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Everybody say Happy Meal!

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Bummer Meal never really took off.

BummerMeal

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There’s a great bit in Fast Food Nation – a book that goes in-depth into the many evils of the fast food industry as a whole, and often McDonalds in particular – in which the author admits that he still eats fast food and enjoys McDonalds’ fries, and says something like “there’s a lot of things wrong with fast food, but McDonalds wouldn’t have sold trillions of hamburgers and fries if they tasted bad. They’re carefully designed to taste good, and they still do.”

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