McDonald's Will Soon Try To Make You Eat Vegetables And Skip The Fries
The
company has made a commitment to offer fruit or a salad in place of fries for
its value meals. Would you like to supersize your salad?
Slowly
but surely, McDonald's is inching towards providing customers healthier
options--a reaction, perhaps, to the company's inability to significantly boost
sales in recent years as healthier competitors like Chipotle gain in
popularity.
The
fast food chain's latest move: a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) commitment to giving
customers who order value meals the option of getting a side salad, fruit or
vegetable instead of french fries (but only in its 20 largest markets, though
those make up 85% of all sales). So yes, the age-old phrase "Do you want
fries with that?" may soon be replaced by "Do you want fries, a
salad, fruit, or a vegetable with that?"
Do
you want fries, a salad, fruit, or a vegetable with that?
McDonald's,
which is partnering with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to implement
the initiative, won't say exactly what will be in the salads, or what fruits
and vegetables will be offered. That will vary by market (Here's hoping nobody
ends up with leftover raw potatoes).
The
chain is also committing to changing the way it promotes children's Happy
Meals--advertising only water, milk, and juice on menu boards, including
nutrition and "well-being messages" on packaging, and using "
Happy Meal and other packaging innovations and designs to generate excitement
for fruit, vegetable, low/reduced-fat dairy, or water options for kids."
For
years, McDonald's has been making small, healthy tweaks to its menu. In 2011,
the chain began automatically including sliced apples (without the traditional
McDonald's caramel dipping sauce) and smaller containers of fries in Happy
Meals. At the time, Cindy Goody, senior director of nutrition for McDonald's
USA, told us: "Parallel to [these
changes] is maintaining the taste, the quality, and wholesome nutrition,
because without those three, we know that customers are not going to feel good
about this. Incremental changes in whatever habit you're trying to change makes
for big impacts." Egg-white Egg McMuffins and grilled chicken wraps have
also been recently added to the menu.
Within
three years, McDonald's plans to have the healthier value meal options and
better Happy Meal advertising in up to 50% of its largest markets. By 2020, the
changes will be in all of the 20 biggest markets.
The
question is whether McDonald's can shake off its long-standing reputation as a
place to go for food that's tasty precisely because it's so unhealthy. If it
can't, it will have trouble taking market share away from the Chipotles,
Subways, and Paneras of the world, which are increasingly popular with the highly coveted
"millennial" demographic. But at least it might cut down on obesity
in its current customers.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3018601/mcdonalds-will-soon-try-to-make-you-eat-vegetables-and-skip-the-fries?partner=newsletter
No comments:
Post a Comment