How McDonald´s Maintains Food Quality

USPA NEWS - With popular concerns over the overall quality of fast food and occasional chicken heads served with meals, customers wonder what precautions McDonald´s has implemented to maintain a consistent food quality.

Many people would agree that consuming fast food on a regular basis probably isn´t the best for your body, and many people also come to realize that there are some occasions in which eating fast food is inevitable. With popular concerns over the overall quality of fast food and occasional chicken heads served with meals, customers wonder what precautions McDonald´s has implemented to maintain a consistent food quality.

According to Gallup poll in 2013, 57% of young adults (aged 18-29) eat fast food on at least a weekly basis, representing the most likely age group to eat fast food. Mina Cho, a 21-year-old Korean student is one such young adult, there´s a McDonald´s restaurant on her university campus, and like many other people her age her main concerns are that fast food “˜may not be of high quality, some of the staff don´t follow through instructions because the bun sometimes have no lettuce in them.´ The quality of food isn´t her only source of concern, “˜the clerks (cashiers) are not kind´ she added.

So we asked McDonald´s Hong Kong on how they try to maintain the best quality of food for all of their customers. According to McDonald´s, there are a multitude of safety checks and quality control measures even before the food arrives in a restaurant. All of their suppliers from all over the world have to be certified by international food safety qualifications as well as comply with McDonald´s very own Supplier Quality Management System and Gold Standard to ensure consistent quality, food safety, appearance, and texture. An independent testing agency also randomly selects suppliers and performs more than 200 tests a year. McDonald´s has plans to increase that number to 20 tests per month.

Inside the kitchens of McDonald´s restaurants, individual members of staff are only given one job to do right. The cashier places your order and collects payment; the initiator receives the order and starts preparing the food; then an assembler puts everything together and places on a heated landing zone; finally a runner, takes the completed food and serves it to customer.

During this process, automated cooking machines adjust cooking times and temperatures to the appropriate levels to make sure that the way they are prepared is consistent. The manager has two main jobs in enduring daily food safety; he has to fill in a Daily Food Safety Booklet as well as implement a first-in-first-out system in the freezer to ensure the freshness of food.

It seems McDonald´s has plenty of standards and safety checks along the entire supply chain to make sure their customers don´t get sick. Nevertheless, when you´ve got to run to a meeting in 20 minutes and you still haven´t had lunch by two, do you really think about food safety?