McDonald’s India ensures that the highest level of food safety standards are consistently maintained across all our restaurants. To ensure this, we have spent six years prior to opening our first restaurant in India to establish our unique cold chain with advanced traceability systems. This is integral to help us reinforce stringent international standards of food safety and quality by tracing every ingredient that goes into our products. This has also immensely benefited both local farmers and customers and has brought about a veritable revolution in the QSR Industry. We know that our French fries are juicy, crispy and totally un-replicable! And there is a good reason for that. We really fuss over our food and its ingredients.
McDonald’s is the only Quick Service Restaurant to have established a closed loop supply chain along with its partners. This ensures that we are agile enough to move quickly to keep pace evolving consumer preferences, are able to maintain consistency and make sure that we only use the bestquality ingredient for all our menu items.
The next time you buy lettuce, think for a second how it got to you in the first place When we went into business, lettuce was not grown in India. Naturally, one of our principal challenges was: ‘Where will we procure our lettuce from?’ The reason: lettuce was grown only within a small 60-day window in a year. Miss that window for some reason and we would be compelled to import at prohibitive costs. We got down to work. We worked extensively with aggregators who worked with hundreds of farmers.
We convinced farmers about the lettuce-growing prospects. We persuaded them to shift the harvest from the plains to hills and then again to the plains to adapt to changing temperatures. We planned. We persevered. We persisted. The result is that we didn’t just help farmers produce lettuce in India; we helped create an entire lettuce growing ecosystem. Even better, we helped strengthen a downstream eco-system that has enhanced lettuce visibility, availability and affordability in India.
The French fries we make are special. Because they are not made from the usual potatoes. They are made from a customized variety that can only be grown in exacting soil and weather conditions – long warm days and cold nights. When we first proposed that this special potato be grown in India, the verdict was: Impossible. Following an extensive analysis, we realised that perhaps there was just one pocket in India where this experiment could be attempted. And that is how we zeroed in on a pocket of Gujarat in 2004
Then, commenced the big battle. Engaging in four plantings and re-plantings to get to our first round of final seed. We got our first indigenous potato that could go into our French fries only in 2007. It took another six years before every single French fry order at our McDonald’s stores was backed by completely indigenous potatoes.
We could have said our work was completed. We didn’t. Because we embarked then on evangelising this specialized potato across more farmers, helping widen their acreage, helping plan their farm space allocation and helping enhance rural prosperity. Today, there are thousands of farmers in India who earn better than the prevailing average because someone across the counter says ‘…and yes, can I order some French fries as well?’
A sip of McCafé coffee is a sip of awesomeness
A coffee is a cup of comfort and happiness that can drive away your blues and get your creative juices flowing! At McDonald’s, we make sure we bring you the best cuppa that you can get – right from the coffee beans we pick to the baristas who brew that aromatic cup of coffee.
We use 100% Arabica beans picked with great love and labour from the coffee farms of Chikmagalur. These beans are then roasted to give them the perfect aroma and taste. And that’s just half the work done. After getting the beans right, we train our baristas for over 100 hours to help them make coffee that’s crafted to your taste. So walk in to McCafé for a warm, frothy cup of awesomeness!
Going the ‘Eggstra’ mile
Fresh, spotless and loaded with protein! That’s how we like our eggs. Who doesn’t love waking up to the fragrance of eggs being whipped in a pan for breakfast? At McDonald’s we make sure we bring you the best quality egg so you get your daily dose of prot