Fast feeder McDonald’s says that it has passed its internal goal of being able to trace 10 percent of its beef purchases back to the farms from whence the animals came.
"We have small targets set, it is kind of an evolution, for 2005, 2006, 2007. It is something again that is very internally driven. It is something that we are trying to challenge ourselves and challenge our suppliers with," Maura Havenga, senior vice president for North America Supply Chain Management at McDonald's Corporation, told a Reuters Food Summit.
The traceability issue became a priority once the first case of mad cow disease found in the US was reported in late 2003.
"We have small targets set, it is kind of an evolution, for 2005, 2006, 2007. It is something again that is very internally driven. It is something that we are trying to challenge ourselves and challenge our suppliers with," Maura Havenga, senior vice president for North America Supply Chain Management at McDonald's Corporation, told a Reuters Food Summit.
The traceability issue became a priority once the first case of mad cow disease found in the US was reported in late 2003.
- KC's View:
-
Normally, we’re a “glass half full” kind of guy.
But in this case, all we can think about is that McDonald’s has no idea where 90 percent of its hamburgers came from. McDonald's is the largest single buyer of United States beef, buying nearly one billion pounds a year – and it doesn’t have traceability information about 900 million pounds of it.
We understand that this is a big undertaking, and that the company is making progress. But it seems to us that there’s a lot of room in here for a disaster to take place.
And this ignores the fact that sometimes we think that some of its burgers aren’t even made of meat…
