A decade ago, the hamburger giant announced it would transform how it procures its most vital ingredient. It’s made progress, although you still can’t buy sustainable beef.
To many sustainable beef is an oxymoron, but McDonalds executives arent giving up. BGSmith via Shutterstock
Ten years ago in January, McDonald’s announced it would begin sourcing “verifiable, sustainable beef” for its hamburgers. The fast-food chain didn’t have a clear definition of “sustainable beef” or a plan for when it might reach its “aspirational goal” of buying only sustainable beef for all 34,500 of its restaurants around the world.
“Realistically, it could take a decade or more to reach the 100% goal,” I wrote in January 2014 in the first of a three-part series on McDonald’s and sustainable beef.
After ten years, I decided to look back at what had happened since then: what McDonald’s, which has promised to reach net-zero carbon by 2050, had accomplished in that time, and what it takes to change an entire industry for the better.
McDonald’s 2014 announcement was a bold move. It took the company a while to start making a plan for how it would get its suppliers and their suppliers to use more environmentally friendly methods. Even though McDonald’s is a big company around the world, it’s not the biggest buyer of beef—it usually buys between 1 5 and 2 percent of total beef consumption where it operates. To meet its goal, it would have to engage its suppliers, competitors and others.
A lot of cattle ranches raise beef for McDonald’s. Their herds range in size from less than a dozen to tens of thousands of animals. In more than 100 countries, the company would have to work with all of these groups in order to make the changes it wanted and had promised the public.
The tempting smell of sizzling beef patties on the grill is a staple at McDonald’s restaurants around the world. From their iconic Big Mac to the McDouble burger, McDonald’s has built an empire on quick and convenient beef-based menu items. But have you ever wondered just how much beef they go through on a daily basis to satisfy their billions of customers? The numbers are simply staggering.
McDonald’s Massive Global Presence
With over 38000 locations in more than 100 countries, McDonald’s has a massive global footprint. Every day nearly 70 million customers pass through their doors.
To feed the hordes, McDonald’s requires a mind-boggling supply chain operation In 2019 alone, the company spent $7 billion on beef purchases worldwide.
Estimating McDonald’s Daily Beef Consumption
Exact beef usage numbers are proprietary. But using available data on annual consumption number of stores and average sales per store, we can make an educated estimate
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McDonald’s uses approximately 1.8 billion pounds of beef per year globally.
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Divided over 365 days per year, that comes to around 5 million pounds of beef per day worldwide.
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With 38,000 stores globally, each location goes through an estimated 130 pounds of beef daily, on average.
That’s a lot of patties! Of course, actual amounts vary widely between regions. Stores in meat-loving countries like the U.S. likely use far more than ones in India, where the menu is tailored to local tastes and sensitivities.
Top Beef Menu Items
Where is all that beef going? McDonald’s best-selling beefy menu items include:
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Big Mac: The OG two-patty burger moves over 550 million units per year.
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Quarter Pounder: The bigger single patty burger sees annual sales of 330 million-plus.
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Cheeseburger: McDonald’s sells nearly 2.5 billion basic cheeseburgers annually.
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McDouble: The budget double cheeseburger accounts for 1.1 billion U.S. sales.
These core menu items plus regional favorites like the McRib and Angus burgers add up to major beef tonnage moved every day.
Why So Much Beef?
There are several reasons McDonald’s relies so heavily on beef:
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Taste preference: Beef has a universally appealing flavor and texture when cooked.
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Cost efficiency: Ground beef patties are relatively inexpensive to produce.
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Brand identity: Burgers are McDonald’s claim to fame and define its image.
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Supply chain: The company has established networks to source massive volumes consistently.
Environmental Impact
However, all that beef has a significant environmental footprint. Beef production accounts for 41% of McDonald’s carbon emissions.
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Cattle raised for beef produce high levels of methane from manure and digestive processes. Methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a heat-trapping gas.
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It takes 7 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of beef, which leads to resource intensive farming.
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Grazing land needed for cattle is linked to deforestation and habitat loss.
The Future of McDonald’s Beef Usage
Due to growing climate change concerns, McDonald’s aims to reduce some beef usage and diversify its protein mix long-term. Strategies include:
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Exploring more poultry, pork, and plant-based options on menus.
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Using a “blended burger” with mushrooms to cut beef percentages.
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Partnering with suppliers on sustainable farming practices to reduce emissions.
However, beef still dominates and will continue driving high daily consumption rates for the foreseeable future.
The Bottom Line
McDonald’s has built its empire on the humble beef patty. Feeding its millions of daily customers requires a supply chain of staggering proportions, easily chomping through 5 million pounds of beef per day around the world. While the company aims to reduce its climate impact, beef will remain its key ingredient due to taste, cost, brand identity, and supply chain factors. The aroma of sizzling burgers on the grill is poised to linger over McDonald’s for decades to come.
From pilots to progress
A lot of bad things happen to the environment when cattle are raised, like trees being cut down, greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and land degradation. Because beef is grown in almost every country, those impacts are global. And with beef consumption set to increase dramatically, they are certain to grow in the coming years. McDonald’s hopes to be a leader in the food industry when it comes to sustainability, but even if the company meets its own goals, it won’t make a big difference in the damage.
In 2012, McDonald’s, in partnership with several NGOs, trade associations, ranchers and other retailers, launched the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, whose members are “committed to making a difference in the sustainability of their industry.” GRSB, in turn, spawned a dozen national and regional roundtables, from Australia to Argentina to the Americas, which focus on issues particular to their region.
GRSB spent much of its first decade simply wrangling members and building consensus. The executive director of the group, Ruaraidh Petre, told me from his office in Aberdeen, Scotland, “It’s a lot of people and a lot of moving parts.” “It’s been a lot of work to get a big industry with a lot of different stakeholders to work together. Some of them are pretty conservative, let’s be honest.” “.
In 2021, after nearly a decade, GRSB established a series of 2030 goals focusing primarily on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving land use and ensuring animal welfare. They’re voluntary and not overly ambitious. The climate goal, for example, aims for a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gases “of each unit of beef,” a relative goal that will likely be overwhelmed by the overall increase in beef consumption: Between now and 2030, the global appetite for beef is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 5.8 percent, according to Grand View Research. That pencils out to just over 40 percent aggregate growth over the next six years, more than enough to offset that 30 percent emissions cut. The industry has no absolute goal to reduce beef’s overall planetary impacts.
During the first couple of years after its 2014 announcement, McDonald’s engaged in a pilot project, working with the various regional roundtables “to define what principles and criteria were for sustainability across the sector,” said McColloch. The company said, in effect, “Well source some beef from those supply chains that are aligned with those principles and criteria.”
Between 2014 and 2016, McDonald’s started doing just that. It purchased a small portion of its beef from verified sustainable Canadian ranches. (Canada is one of the few countries with a program to certify beef sustainability. Nearly 9,000 cows were used in that project, which produced about 300,000 pounds of beef that McDonald’s used to make 2 4 million “sustainable” hamburger patties. That’s roughly one-tenth of a percent of the 2. 5 billion burgers the company sells each year worldwide.
Among the project’s objectives: to bring the GRSB’s Principles and Criteria to life and to accelerate development of an industry-led beef sustainability framework.
An Alberta farmer named Greg Bowie, who has been on the board of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and raises Charolais cattle, told me, “The indicators that McDonald’s used in the pilot project were a starting point for the indicators that the [Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef] used in their certification process.” “They did a lot to help build trust between the people who raise animals and the people who buy our products.” “.
From 2016 on, the company worked on building the industry’s infrastructure and a network of on-farm research programs to show how sustainable beef could be. “We chose 10 sourcing markets that together made up about 85% of our beef volume and told them, ‘In all of those markets, we’re going to have a farmer network, we’re going to set up flagship farms, and we’re going to do research on beef standability programs that are in line with the GRSB criteria and principles,'” McColloch explained. “And from every one of those markets, we will source some portion of beef from those supply chains. ’”.
The US still eats more meat than almost every other country, but developing countries are beginning to catch up.
Intentions versus realities
What I learned while reporting for several months shows what can happen when a company with good intentions tries to change complicated global supply chains in the real world. And it shows a big, slow-moving business that, like cows, seems to spend a lot of time thinking about what “sustainable beef” means and how to get a big group of sometimes stubborn players to go in a different direction.
For McDonald’s, progress has been slow and nuanced, but also undeniable. On the one hand, there has been a lot of activity, especially around the farmers and ranchers at the beginning of the hamburger supply chain, who have the most significant environmental effects. McDonald’s is the undisputed leader when it comes to beef sustainability, at least among the larger players. From ranchers to retailers, everyone in the beef value chain sees the company as a key driver of projects and partnerships that are slowly but surely making the sector better.
But even after ten years, the company and the global beef industry as a whole are still trying to come up with basic definitions, metrics, and goals for sustainable beef, as well as setting goals and timelines for progress. Big Mac and Quarter Pounder lovers won’t be buying a sustainable burger any time soon. And McDonald’s has yet to set any companywide sustainability goals for beef.
I asked Marion Gross, executive vice president and global chief supply chain officer at McDonald’s, what information is available in the company’s supply chain that shows if it is actually moving forward. She admitted that the company still lacks clear answers.
“We are still learning what are the right measures,” said Gross. “How do we measure and validate? We know from some of the pilots we’ve done around the world that regenerative farming practices can store carbon and lower emissions, but I don’t think we have the final answer yet when it comes to measuring.”
“It’s very complicated, and it will take years before we can say for sure that we are making a difference and how much.” “.
Moreover, the company changed the goal. A few years after the announcement, McDonald’s switched from using “sustainable beef,” which sounds like the best possible outcome, to “beef sustainability,” which sounds like a journey that is still going on.
“Some people inside the company thought we should have started with the term ‘beef sustainability’ instead of’sustainable beef,'” Jenny McColloch, the chief sustainability officer of the company, told me. “‘Beef sustainability’ is a long-term ethos and journey. That was a semantic shift that was deliberate in our earlier years. “.
A decade later, the story of McDonald’s and beef sustainability raises more questions than answers. How much can one company, even a big one like McDonald’s, change supply chains and markets? How much is an agricultural industry that has been around for hundreds of years willing to change? And finally, and this may be the most important question: Can beef production become sustainable at the current rate of consumption? In other words, will “sustainable beef” always be an oxymoron?
A lot of bad things happen to the environment when cattle are raised, like trees being cut down, greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and land degradation.
McDonalds: Behind the Scenes of the Menu | Good Morning America | ABC News
Does McDonalds use 100% beef?
While McDonalds says it uses 100% Beef in its burgers (now they claim they use 100% Canadian Beef in Canada) it in fact buys meat from a company called 100% Beef. Therefore they can put 100% Beef on their packages, advertising, etc. This create a sort of “loophole” that fools the general public.
How much beef does McDonald’s buy a year?
E ach year, McDonald’s buys as much as 1.9bn lb of beef that it packs into patties for millions of Happy Meals, Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, Triple Cheeseburgers and other popular beefy sandwiches served across the globe.
Does McDonald’s have beef?
We have answers to all of your questions about McDonald’s burgers and beef. Whether you’re wondering if McDonald’s uses real beef or does McDonald’s have a veggie burger — we’ve got an answer in our FAQ. Are McDonald’s burgers fresh or frozen? Our 100% beef is ground, formed into patties, and then flash frozen.
Does McDonald’s use frozen beef?
In 2018, McDonald’s announced they would be using fresh (rather than frozen) beef in their hamburgers: All of our beef patties are made from 100 percent pure beef — that means no additives, preservatives or fillers — and seasoned with only a pinch of salt and pepper.