Dairy has been a mainstay ingredient on McDonald’s menu since the quick-service restaurant’s beginning more than 60 years ago.
In fact, it was an order for several milkshake mixers that brought Ray Kroc, a Multi-mixer salesman and later founder of McDonald’s System Inc., to the original restaurant in San Bernardino, California.
“Dairy has been foundational to McDonald’s brand for over 60 years, and it will remain a key ingredient as McDonald’s continues,” said Paul Ziemnisky, senior vice president, global partnerships, Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), to a group of dairy media invited to spend a day on the McDonald’s campus in Oak Brook, Illinois.
From its 14,000 stores, McDonald’s serves 27 million people per day. With more than 80 percent of the menu items containing dairy, that is a significant amount of exposure for dairy products.
Recognizing this magnitude, DMI and McDonald’s began working together and discovered their shared values of listening to consumers and increasing access to nutrient-rich products.
A partnership was formed to share insights and dairy trends. In new product development, the McDonald’s team turns to DMI food scientists to help bring the products to life. In fact, Porter Myrick and Divya Reddy are DMI food scientists whose offices are located at McDonald’s corporate office.
When products grow closer to launch, DMI team members consult with the McDonald’s team on how to address nutrition and promotion.
Jacqi Coleman, vice president, global partnerships, DMI, leads the McDonald’s partnership and spends a couple of days each week at the corporate office as well.
“The DMI team is very much a part of the McDonald’s family,” said Danielle Paris, manager of menu innovation, McDonald’s.
The partnership helps drive dairy sales through menu items and marketing. It also builds consumer trust in dairy and is an avenue to celebrate milk and the power of protein, Coleman said.
“It’s not just about milk or just about butter; the breadth of products we’ve touched is really impressive,” she added. Dairy can be found in Happy Meals, breakfast items, McCafé products, cheeseburgers, buttermilk chicken, beverages and desserts, and snacks and sides.
In 2015, McDonald’s was using 14 percent more dairy (in milk-equivalent pounds) than it was at the start of the formal partnership in 2009.
According to McDonald’s team members, the DMI partnership provides them with dairy expertise, moves product development faster, gets the restaurant further down the supply chain and helps to influence the position of dairy at McDonald’s.
The Happy Meal is very important to McDonald’s and has also had a significant impact on dairy. The switch from milk cartons to plastic bottles in 2004 not only sold more milk at McDonald’s but also was a trend picked up by other quick-service restaurants.
Ten years later, the restaurant was also the first to remove soda as a beverage choice on the menu board for Happy Meals and promoted milk, water and juice as options.
The amount of dairy chosen by consumers from the children’s menu increased by 9 percent and was again followed by other restaurants across the country.
DMI food scientists had a hand in cracking the code to formulate fat-free chocolate milk specific for McDonald’s menu. The product contains 20 percent fewer calories, 10 percent less sugar and the same nine essential nutrients compared to the previous 1 percent chocolate milk option at McDonald’s.
Furthering the commitment to help children get their 3-A-Day of dairy, yogurt was added as a side option in Happy Meals. More than 300 million tubes of yogurt have been sold since July 2014.
Again, McDonald’s wanted a healthy choice and turned to the DMI team to help create a product with 25 percent less sugar and no high-fructose corn syrup compared to the retail option by the same brand.
Most of the ingredients or recipes are proprietary, and it takes a lot of work with suppliers to get them right and duplicated at the scale required by McDonald’s.
DMI assists in working with the supply chain as well as training operations team members to make sure the products will be served the same from restaurant to restaurant.
McDonald’s catalytic or ripple effect throughout the industry goes beyond the Happy Meal. Shortly after announcing the all-day breakfast option (which was paired with a switch to real butter), other restaurants followed suit, Coleman said.
She pointed out McDonald’s is using the REAL seal in its advertising. This noticeable icon is second only to cotton in terms of consumer recognition.
It is also working with DMI to leverage the seal in new and different ways, such as a “made with” initiative when it comes to advertising the buttermilk crispy chicken sandwich, released in August 2015.
These marketing efforts exponentially expand the use of dairy checkoff dollars. “Our partners spend way more than we (DMI) ever could in advertising,” Ziemnisky said.
Of DMI’s four food service partners, each one has its own unique relationship. The McDonald’s partnership is the longest-running. “The longer you have, the more you can build those relationships,” Ziemnisky said, stating that it continues to evolve and offer more in terms of product development and promotion each year. PD
PHOTO 1: Test kitchens resemble the kitchens found in McDonald’s restaurants across the country.
PHOTO 2: Porter Myrick, director of product development, global innovation partnerships, is a Dairy Management Inc. employee with an office inside McDonald’s corporate office. He has played an instrumental role in the restaurant’s switch to butter, fat-free chocolate milk, reduced-sugar yogurt and buttermilk chicken.
PHOTO 3: A chef prepares a new specialty burger not yet on the McDonald’s menu.
PHOTO 4: The Multi-mixer was the original milkshake machine used by McDonald’s and what led to founder Ray Kroc walking into the first restaurant as a salesman of the machine.
PHOTO 5: “The Arch” is a McDonald’s restaurant inside the campus office building where the latest and greatest menu items are offered. It also showcases a new digital menu board that allows the restaurant to display more food images through revolving signs. Photos by Karen Lee.
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Karen Lee
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