It's good Mc Heartattack is finally starting to use fresh fruits :-) Maybe someday it will even be Mc Healthy:
You Want Any Fruit With That Big Mac?
By MELANIE WARNER
Published: February 20, 2005
ACH day, 50,000 shiny, fire-engine-red Gala apples work their way through a sprawling factory in Swedesboro, N.J. Inside, 26 machines wash them, core them, peel them, seed them, slice them and chill them. At the end of the line, they are dunked in a solution of calcium ascorbate and then deposited into little green bags featuring a jogging Ronald McDonald.
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From there, the bags make their way in refrigerated trucks to refrigerated containers in cavernous distribution centers, and then to thousands of McDonald's restaurants up and down the Eastern Seaboard. No more than 14 days after leaving the plant, the fruit will take the place of French fries in some child's Happy Meal.
The apple slices, called Apple Dippers, are a symbol of how McDonald's is trying to offer healthier food to its customers - and to answer the many critics who contend that most of its menu is of poor nutritional quality. McDonald's has also introduced "premium" salads, in Caesar, California Cobb and Bacon Ranch varieties, a lineup that will soon be joined by a salad of grapes, walnuts - and, of course, apples.
It remains to be seen whether these new offerings will assuage the concerns of public health officials and other critics of McDonald's highly processed fat- and calorie-laden sandwiches, drinks and fries. So far, they have not - at least not entirely. But this much is already clear: Just as its staple burger-and-fries meals have made McDonald's the largest single buyer of beef and potatoes in the country, its new focus on fresh fruits and vegetables is making the company a major player in the $80 billion American produce industry.
The potential impact goes beyond dollars and cents. Some people believe that McDonald's could influence not only the volume, variety and prices of fruit and produce in the nation but also how they are grown.
The company now buys more fresh apples than any other restaurant or food service operation, by far. This year, it expects to buy 54 million pounds of fresh apples - about 135 million individual pieces of fruit. That is up from zero apples just two years ago. (This does not include fruit used to make juice and pies, which use a different quality of apple.)
And it is not just apples: McDonald's is also among the top five food-service buyers of grape tomatoes and spring mix lettuce - a combination of greens like arugula, radicchio and frisée. The boom has been so big and so fast that growers of other produce, like carrots and oranges, are scrambling for a piece of the action.
OF course, other fast-food chains have similar salads and fruit choices on their menus, but they have not had a comparable influence on the market because of their smaller size. Burger King, for example, has 7,600 restaurants in the United States, while Wendy's has 5,900 and Arby's has 3,300. McDonald's has 13,700.
While salads have been offered at McDonald's in some form or another since the late 1980's, this is the first time they have been big sellers. And Apple Dippers are the first fruit the chain has sold that did not reside between two layers of pie crust.
Missa Bay, the company that runs the Swedesboro plant - one of six McDonald's apple slicing facilities around the country - could not be happier about that.
"McDonald's is really pioneering the concept of ready-to-eat sliced apples," said Sal Tedesco, the chief operating officer of Missa Bay, which built the new production line specifically to process apple slices for McDonald's.
In a few months, Missa Bay, owned by Ready Pac Produce of Irwindale, Calif., will also be supplying roughly one-quarter of the 13,700 restaurants with sliced green apples for the new fruit salad, which is scheduled to be introduced in May. Mr. Tedesco said that these two items would increase Missa Bay's revenue by at least 10 percent this year.
With those kinds of numbers comes power. Just as the enormous size of McDonald's once helped the company turn the nation's beef, chicken and potato industries into highly mechanized, consistent, efficient and low-cost businesses, McDonald's is using its purchasing decisions to build a reliable supply of fresh fruits and vegetables that meet its exacting specifications.
At the U.S. Apple Association's annual marketing conference in Chicago last summer, Mitch Smith, the McDonald's director of quality systems in the United States, told a crowd of growers, many from the big apple-producing states of Washington and New York, that if they wanted to work with McDonald's, they should grow more Cameo and Pink Lady apples. Historically, growers have produced relatively few apples of these varieties, but McDonald's likes them for their crispness and flavor.
Already, Cameo production in Washington State is up 58 percent in the current crop year from a year earlier, according to the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association.
There's more to the story:
nytimes.com |
