McDonald’s goes green – but not all customers are lovin’ it
McDonald’s is a company on a mission. Tired of being held up as an example of corporate evil and greed, the fast food chain has been hitting out at critics with a series of environmental and social initiatives designed to prove that it cares. Not content with that, the company is also going through a full makeover, redesigning some of its restaurants in a way that it hopes will revitalise the sites and attract more customers. On Monday, the group announced its latest initiative: to turn its spent cooking oil into biodiesel fuel to power its vans in the UK. This is the latest in a series of environmental and health moves. Recently, for example, the group swapped over to non-hydrogenated cooking oil in its restaurants. (… )In the UK, a sheet of paper on customers’ trays shows a photo of George Horton, a 43-year-old farmer in Wiltshire and a McDonald’s supplier, who produces the food they eat. Even Greenpeace, which has worked with McDonald’s on making sure the soya they source from Brazil is produced by companies that do not destroy the rainforest, says the company has been progressive. Pat Venditti, forest campaigner at the charity, says: “What we’ve seen is that they have taken a very good leadership role in terms of how they approach environmental issues.” Others are not so sure of their initiatives. Sustain, the food and agriculture charity, for example, is concerned about its advertising to children. But the group has started to change the appearance of its cafes – so much that the staunchest critics of fast food are now in danger of inadvertently stumbling into a restyled restaurant. (…) Mark Basham, a restaurants and hotels analyst at Standard & Poor’s, said: “The revamped menus, the rebranded stores, the company’s more progressive stance on the environment have all had a positive influence on consumers.” He says the redesign “entices people to spend more time there and therefore spend more money, and it encourages people to go at different times of the day than they normally would”. Image source: thinklab.typepad.com > Continue
News selected by Covalence | Country: UK | Company: McDonald’s
