The fast food company also said it eliminated artificial preservatives from Chicken McNuggets and several breakfast items, including scrambled eggs.
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Dunkin’ Donuts, for instance, has promised to put more egg in its egg patty. And good on the other chains, such as Taco Bell and Panera Bread, which have announced similar efforts to rid the menu of artificial preservatives.
Mr. Andres said the changes discussed Monday affect ingredients in almost half of the food on its menu.
“Our culinary focus is more important than ever”, said Ms. Foust, who serves as one of the faces of the company’s food focus, including an appearance in a commercial for McDonald’s in Southern California for chef-crafted sandwiches. That goal is expected to take 10 years, but McDonald’s finished ahead of schedule when it came to moving away from using chicken treated with antibiotics critical to human medicine.
Other possible healthy points of interest for McDonald’s that it announced at the time included images of its new “breakfast bowls”, freshly cracked eggs and other items that the franchise is testing.
McDonald’s said while the current changes will increase its costs, it will not pass on the increase to its consumers.
McDonald’s has, of course, been the target of criticism over its ingredients.
“In the early days we didn’t have as many distributors so we wanted a long shelf life so could go across the country”, McDonald’s USA chief supply chain officer Marion Gross told Fortune. The company had already signaled such changes were in store, telling investors during a presentation in late 2014 about how it was fixing its struggling business that it was evaluating its cooking procedures and ingredients.
McDonald’s is debuting new buns without high-fructose corn syrup for an array of its sandwiches.
The company’s sales in its flagship USA market have showed improvement, helped by the fanfare over the introduction of an all-day breakfast menu in October.
Overall, McDonald’s and many fast food establishments still load food with too much salt, sugar and fat and encourage patrons to overeat by promoting super-sized meals, says Michael Moss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”.
Also, in the past the Egg McMuffins became free of margarine and butter was used instead.
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For the most recent quarter, the AP noted, revenues were up 1.8 percent at “established locations”, which were boosted by higher pricing as customers elected to purchase more costly options.
