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.
As one of the world’s largest fast food chains, McDonald’s serves up a mind-boggling number of burgers on a daily basis. But just how much beef does the Golden Arches go through in a year to keep its beefy menu items like Big Macs, Quarter Pounders and Triple Cheeseburgers in constant supply?
The sheer volume is pretty astonishing Let’s break down the massive beef consumption behind the world’s most iconic fast food brand
McDonald’s Beef Supply Chain by the Numbers
To continually stock its over 36,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries, McDonald’s maintains a complex global beef supply chain Some key stats
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1.9 billion pounds – McDonald’s own estimate of the total beef it purchases annually. That’s about 0.5% of total global beef production.
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7+ million cattle – The estimated number of cows slaughtered each year to produce McDonald’s beef orders.
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53+ million metric tons – McDonald’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, exceeding entire nations. Beef production comprises the majority.
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9th largest – Where McDonald’s ranks in total beef usage globally, behind only entire nations.
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$1 billion – Reportedly spent per year by McDonald’s on beef alone in the United States.
That’s a whole lot of cows and Big Macs! Keeping beef supply steady across tens of thousands of locations worldwide is a major endeavor.
Why Does McDonald’s Rely So Heavily on Beef?
There are several reasons beef dominates McDonald’s menu:
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Convention – Burgers have been core to McDonald’s image and menu since its founding in the 1940s. Customers expect to see iconic beef sandwiches.
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Demand – Despite health concerns, Americans especially still eat a lot of red meat. McDonald’s sells what consumers want.
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Efficiency – Processed beef patties are fast and consistent to cook in bulk on the grill. It fits McDonald’s rapid service model.
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Flavor – The fatty, savory taste of beef is craveable and gives McDonald’s food its signature flavor.
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Affordability – Government corn and grain subsidies make beef cheap to mass produce in the U.S.
McDonald’s has prioritized convenience, cost savings, and custom over reducing its massive beef footprint. But that may need to evolve as climate concerns around beef production grow.
Diving Into the Math of McDonald’s Beef Supply
To satisfy enormous demand, exactly how much beef gets turned into burgers for McDonald’s every year?
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McDonald’s said in 2014 it used 777 million pounds of beef per year in the U.S. alone.
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For its global restaurants, it likely uses around 1.9 billion pounds annually, based on calculations of its total beef usage as a percentage of global production.
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With roughly 480 quarter pound patties per cow, that means it takes about 4 million cattle to supply McDonald’s U.S. beef.
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For worldwide beef demand, estimations range from 7 million to 10 million cows slaughtered each year total.
So around 7-10 million cattle yearly meet demand for McDonald’s beef burgers, sandwiches and other menu items. The sustainability impacts of that supply chain are massive.
The Environmental Impact of McDonald’s Beef Addiction
Raising millions of cows for beef exacts a steep toll on the planet. Consider that:
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Cattle produce high levels of methane from manure and digestive processes – a potent greenhouse gas.
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It takes far more land, feed, water and energy to raise cows than poultry or pigs. The carbon footprint of beef dwarfs other meats.
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Beef production is linked to deforestation for grazing land, especially in the Amazon.
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Only about 6% of a cow gets turned into meat. The rest is wasted.
Given beef’s disproportionate climate impact, McDonald’s over-reliance on it in its menu means its carbon footprint towers over chains using more poultry or plant proteins.
As health and environmental concerns around over-consumption of beef grow, the pressure is on for McDonald’s to diversify its protein offerings and reduce its yearly beef usage.
Where Do McDonald’s Beef Patties Come From?
McDonald’s sources beef from thousands of slaughterhouses and grinding facilities worldwide. Despite its size, it still only accounts for a fraction of total production.
Around two dozen facilities supply McDonald’s with the bulk of its U.S. beef:
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Cargill, Tyson Foods and JBS supply the majority of McDonald’s patties in the U.S.
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These “grinding” plants source slaughtered beef from facilities across the Midwest especially.
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McDonald’s owns just one patty production plant itself, in the U.S.
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The company doesn’t own any cattle farms or slaughterhouses directly.
Monitoring conditions across such a complex, fragmented supply chain proves challenging. Animal welfare groups have documented troubling practices at some McDonald’s beef providers over the years.
Why All the Secrecy Around McDonald’s Beef Usage?
For a restaurant chain built around the humble burger, McDonald’s is surprisingly secretive about the true volume of beef it serves up every year.
The company releases limited data, making exact yearly quantities hard to verify. Potential reasons for this include:
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Avoid drawing more attention to beef’s climate impacts.
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Prevent giving competitors insights into its supply chain.
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Minimize exposing itself to fluctuations in beef prices.
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Not foster more scrutiny on its relationships with major beef industry players.
However, as consumer demand for transparency grows, McDonald’s may have to divulge more details on its gargantuan annual beef consumption and the impacts that result from supplying its menus worldwide.
The Bottom Line
McDonald’s has built its fast food empire on the back of affordable, mass-produced beef. But its devotion to burgers comes at an environmental cost.
As health and sustainability concerns around overusing beef escalate, McDonald’s lags competitors in offering alternative proteins. It has yet to make serious commitments to reducing its yearly beef tonnage.
But as a beef purchaser of McDonald’s scale, even modest supply chain changes could positively impact climate. Its buying leverage provides opportunities, if applied effectively. The question is whether the fast food giant can begin transforming its beef-centric brand and business model in time.
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.
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.
How Much Mcdonald’s Franchise Owners Really Make Per Year
FAQ
How much beef does McDonalds consume?
How many pounds of beef does McDonalds use annually?
What percent of McDonalds beef is real?
Is McDonalds the largest buyer of beef?
How much beef does McDonalds eat a year?
In the United States alone, people eat over 1 billion pounds of beef at McDonald’s in a year, which is 5½ million head of cattle. McDonalds Corporation sells over 1 billion cups of coffee each year around the world. It sells 500 million cups a day in the U.S. alone. McDonald’s opens a new restaurant every four hours.
How much beef does McDonald’s sell?
In the United States alone, McDonald’s sells more than 1 billion pounds of beef and more than 500 million cups of coffee each year.
How much food does McDonald’s sell?
McDonald’s sells a tremendous amount of food each year in the U.S. alone — by some estimates, more than 1 billion pounds of beef (from 5-1/2 million head of cattle) and more than 500 million cups of coffee. Globally, the company buys 3.4 billion pounds of potatoes every year, and serves more than 9 million pounds of french fries every day.
Will McDonald’s change the beef industry?
Still, it’s clear that McDonald’s is committed to some ambitious changes that could lead to a massive overhaul in the beef industry, especially in the United States. That’s because McDonald’s is the biggest buyer of beef in the U.S., buying about 800 million pounds of beef every year and accounting for three percent of U.S. beef consumption.