Efficiency: McDonald’s franchisees follow extensive rules and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Work is divided between chefs and food servers to maximize food production and customer service. The McDonald’s “Made For You” customized cooking platform2 ensures efficient, consistent production of a variety of foods.
Quality: McDonald’s ensures quality in its products through extensive SOPs and the use of backward vertical integration when needed. Regulated cooking procedures and training ensures high-quality food, whether you’re in America or in Russia. It incorporates rigorous quality control procedures, monitors its franchisees, and retains ownership of restaurants along US interstates in order to maintain quality and continued positive brand recognition. Few customers have bad experiences and most retain strong brand loyalty.
Innovation: McDonald’s recent innovations include the New Tastes Menu (40-item rolling menu) and Mighty Kids Meals (preteen version of the Happy Meal). In an attempt to expand beyond the hamburger market, McDonald’s has acquired 156 Donato’s Pizza stores, 700 Boston Market stores, 100 United Kingdom Pret A Manger sandwich stores, and 41 United Kingdom Aroma Café stores. Quantum technological changes in its production principles allow it to continually improve the flavor and texture of its food products. McDonald’s is initiating electronic payment options and has ventured into Internet commerce.
Customer Responsiveness: McDonald’s has maintained the core values of founder Ray Kroc: cleanliness and customer service. It employs a multi-domestic strategy and company managers go to great lengths to ensure their perceptions of a country’s culture and tastes in food are accurate. McDonald’s anticipates customers’ preferences and needs and quickly meets those needs. It sells toys tied to current entertainment markets in its kids’ and preteens’ meals to ensure brand loyalty in its ownership of the youth market. It satisfies customer preference for a wide variety of options by providing many different types of foods, including beef, chicken, fish, pork, eggs, breakfast foods, fries, salad, juice, soda, desserts, ice cream, and more.
Summary: McDonald's has achieved positive brand loyalty and recognition by keeping the quality of its products and franchises globally consistent. It has achieved market focus and competitive advantage by remaining true to founder Ray Kroc’s QSC&V (quality, service, cleanliness, and value for money) core values. It is committed to growth through great tasting food, superior service, everyday value and convenience and has become the segment leader recognized as the largest and best-known global foodservice retailer. It has focused on a single concentration corporate strategy combined with low-cost and multi-domestic strategies to best serve its customers. The vast number of successful franchises denotes the efficiency of McDonald’s management, organizational model, site development expertise, and advanced operational systems. McDonald’s Hamburger University has gained a reputation as a training academy that produces experienced managers. Ronald McDonald ranks second to Santa Claus in global popularity.
1.www.enterblog.com
2.www.twocw.net/
3. Use a model from your textbook to describe how fast food restaurants have transformed beef production in the U.S.A.?
You can smell Greeley, Colorado, long before you can see it. The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The smell is worst during the summer months, hanging heavy in the warm air, almost assuming a physical presence, blanketing Greeley day and night. Some people who live there no longer notice the smell; it recedes into the background, present but not present, like the sound of traffic for most New Yorkers. Others can't stop thinking about the smell, even after years; it permeates everything, sickens them, interferes with their sleep. Greeley is a factory town, one where cattle are the units of production.
Monfort Inc., "The Complete Meat Company," runs a beef slaughterhouse, a sheep slaughterhouse and processing plants a few miles north of Greeley. To supply the beef slaughterhouse, Monfort operates two of the nation's largest feedlots, which together hold up to 200,000 head of cattle. One of the feedlots stretches for almost two miles along Highway 35. At times, the animals are crowded so closely together that it looks like a Woodstock Festival for cattle, a moving mass of animals that goes on for acres. At feeding time, the cattle don't eat blue grama and buffalo grass off the prairie; during the three months before slaughter, they eat surplus grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle more rapidly than grass would. Almost two-thirds of the grain produced in the U.S. is now used to feed livestock, mainly cattle.
A typical steer will consume about two tons of grain during its stay at a feedlot, just to gain 400 pounds in weight. The process involves a fair amount of waste. Each steer deposits about fifty pounds of manure every day. The two feedlots outside Greeley produced more excrement last year than the populations of Denver, Boston, Atlanta and St. Louis -- combined.
The way MacDonald transform beef is to bring dozens of cows and kill htem , then they go through process . at the end or the output will be beef to be used for habrguers.
Americans spend $110 billion a year on fatty, sugary fast food, more than they do on films, videos, books, magazines, newspapers and music combined.
Nearly two thirds of Americans are now overweight, and the US Surgeon General says 300,000 Americans die each year of obesity.
As fast food chains spread through Europe and Asia on a rising tide of affluence, people got fatter in those countries. It is called , “globosity” by the World Health Organization (WHO).
In 1995, the WHO estimates there were 200 million adults and another 18 million under-five children classified as overweight. By 2000 the number of obese adults had risen to 300 million.
4. What are some of McDonald’s marking process innovations?
The importance of recruitment, and creativity and innovations comes first with McDonalds. They have used Tec logy to update their process.
For McDonald's, people are its most important asset. This is because customer satisfaction begins with the attitudes and abilities of employees and committed, effective workers are the best route to success. For these reasons, McDonald's strives to attract and hire the best, and to provide the best place to work.
All businesses experience staff turnover for various reasons e.g. career change, leaving the area, returning to education, a new opportunity elsewhere. Recruiting and training staff is very expensive and businesses will look to keep staff turnover to a minimum. One way of doing this is to 'choose wisely, and treat well'.
McDonald's needs people who want to excel in delivering outstanding service. To ensure the company recruits the right people, it has identified essential skills and behaviors that applicants should be able to demonstrate. For each position there is a job description outlining typical duties and responsibilities and a person specification defining personal skills and competences.
1- McDonald's case overview
Situation
Mired in a price war and escalating domestic competition in 1993, McDonald's sought to create new customer value by re-inventing its core restaurant systems -- service at the front counter and drive-thru, and the basic kitchen processes involved in producing its menu. The objective was to create a competitive advantage via delivering better experiences, including better food.
What we did
From extensive video research into customer and crew behaviors, we helped McDonald's develop a simple but powerful model of customers' expectations and frustrations as they visited McDonald's. We used this model to create design principles that drove scores of infrastructure and process innovations both at the counter and in the drive-thru process. Then, having established customer requirements for product and service quality, we analyzed kitchen processes, revealing an underlying structure that McDonald's Restaurant Systems Group used to fundamentally re-invent their approach to food production.
Results
Our work on counter and drive-thru service experiences has led to new restaurant interiors and processes throughout their U.S. stores, but most vividly implemented in a Colorado Springs test market.
http://www.doblin.com/who/casestudies/McDonalds.htm
Premium McDonald's Coffee
Smartmoney.com: McDonald's is testing high-end coffee in restaurants, and analysts say it's a matter of time before that company and other U.S. fast-food chains start offering a better brew.
Profits on specialty coffee, a nearly $9 billion a year retail market in the U.S., are too large for the chains to ignore.
Test Results Positive So Far
"McDonald's is testing premium-quality coffee in select markets across the U.S. and we're giving customers an opportunity to say what they think," said Bill Whitman, spokesman for McDonald's in Oak Brook, Ill. "We haven't set a date for a national rollout. We continue to learn from the tests, and results so far have been positive."
The company's coffee sales have risen in recent years, "and it's not just people coming in for breakfast coffee anymore - they're coming in throughout the day," Whitman observed. "We serve 23 million U.S. customers each day and want to meet their needs at a value price. We're interested in competing with ourselves, not other companies."
Jack Russo, beverage analyst at A.G. Edwards in St. Louis, said McDonald's is trying to upgrade some of its current menu offerings. "They're looking at what they can do better, and coffee is one of those items. They're not going to try to compete with Starbucks."
- Describe the franchising process. Why does the author claim that McDonalds is in the real estate business?
When the McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac opened their first restaurant in 1940 in San Bernardino, California, they could never have imagined the phenomenal growth that their would enjoy. From extremely modest beginnings, they hit on a winning formula selling a high product cheaply and quickly. However, it was not until Ray Kroc, a Chicago based salesman with a flair for , became involved that the business really started to grow. He realized that the same successful McDonald's formula could be exploited throughout the United States and beyond.
There are now more than 30,000 McDonald's Restaurants in over 119 countries. In 2002, they served over 16 billion , equivalent to a lunch and dinner for every man, woman and child in the world! McDonald's global sales were over $41bn, making it by far the largest food service company in the world.
In 1955, Ray Kroc realized that the key to success was rapid expansion. The best way to achieve this was through offering . Today, over 70 percent of McDonald's restaurants are run on this basis. In the UK, the first franchised restaurant opened in 1986 - there are now over 1,200 restaurants, employing more than 70,000 people, of which 36 percent are operated by franchisees.
This case study examines the success of franchising.
Challenges
As the world's largest restaurant chain, McDonald's is the target for criticism. Even though the majority interest in its foreign franchise locations are locally owned, the company is seen as a symbol of American domination of economic resources. Urban legends about the company and its food abound and it is often the target of unusual lawsuits.
Some franchises in the Middle East have been targets of arson and other acts of violence because the business represents, to the attackers, an invasion by American
business and culture that they oppose based on a nationalist or Islamist ideology.
However, McDonalds has modified its products to cater for local tastes, not least in countries that have special dietary laws. In Muslim countries like Malaysia,
bacon is not served in McDonalds burgers or in its breakfast menu, as pork is not permissible under Islamic dietary law. In Israel, the nature of kosher dietary laws, forbidding the mixture of meat and dairy products, means that cheeseburgers are not popular among Jewish customers; furthermore, all meat not prepared in a certain manner is considered junketer by strict observers of the dietary laws. McDonalds has taken steps to cater to Jewish customers by opening a kosher McDonalds in Jerusalem.
Criticism
As the world's largest fast-food company, McDonald's has been the target of criticism for allegations of exploitation of entry-level workers, ecological damage caused by agricultural production and industrial processing of its products, selling unhealthy food.
In the high profile, McLibel Trial McDonald's took two anti-McDonald's campaigners, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, to court for a trial lasting two and a half years - the longest in English legal history. McDonald has won the case: however, many of the campaigners' criticisms of the company were found to be fair, creating a great deal of bad publicity for the company.
McDonald's has also been criticized for its litigious and heavy-handed approach to preserving its image and copyrights - in one case suing a Scottish cafe owner called McDonald for infringement of the name McDonald's, even though the business in question was a family business dating back well over a century.
www.mcdonalds.com
- How has globalization affected McDonald’s operations?
The story of McDonalds’ successes in France and in East Asia illustrates, I believe, how an American food cultural export gets creolized. This is not without the resemblance of some “cultural imperialism.” However, I think the McDonalidization process is more benign than “colonization.” It is more akin to a process of negotiation, which is essentially what localization is all about. McDonalds, to sell their burgers, must capitalize on consumer tastes, by giving their standards and marketing strategies a local touch, at the same time playing up the American cultural associations that foreign cultures desire. However, local cultures consumers, too, demand something out of the negotiation. McDonalds must change in order to be acceptable, and in more ways than just altering their menu and playing foreign elevator music. The meaning and use of McDonald’s changes in ways the corporation never would have imagined. The meaning of McDonald’s, as a cultural import, must get recontextualized in order for it to be utilized. As a result, rather than McDonaldization producing cultural homogenization, cultural identity is not degraded in this process, as critics of “cultural imperialism” would argue. In other words, the globalization of food does not result in the homogenization of cultures. This observation may suggest that globalization, on the macro-level, similarly may not produce a global culture.
George Ritzer coined the phrase “McDonaldization of Society” in order to describe the process of modernization that is associated with the fast food industry. The fast food restaurant, he argues, is “the contemporary paradigm of the rationalization process.”[2] It represents an “increase in efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control through the substitution of non-human for human technology...also bringing with its rationality simultaneous irrationalities,” such as dehumanization and homogenization. Extending his critique further, Ritzer views this process as pervading all aspects of society, from business practices to education practices. . The American-style of eating on the run is a characteristic of fast food that also illustrates the tendency towards efficiency and control that Ritzer is referring to.. Fast food does of course affect the way people eat and work and live. It affects and often discourages local businesses, it empowers the multinational corporations; it can degrade the environment, and change cultural values. However, the reality is more complex than this. Foreign consumers are more than just Big-Mac eating robots, as critics of cultural imperialism would argue. McDonalidzation is a powerful and influential process, but it does not, I argue, produce total acculturation. Foreign consumers both shape, and are shaped by, Mcdonald’s. They both accept and reject aspects of McDonald’s, because what they essentially want is the feeling of transnationality and the feeling of locality. They want a part of American culture, without relinquishing the symbols and meanings that give them their local cultural identity. McDonald’s only becomes familiar over time - cultures new to the McDonald’s away must be educated before they can be good Big Mac consumers. They must be taught how to work within the industrialized food establishment. The queue, for example, the organized, delineated line-placing system that Americans take for granted when waiting at for a cash register, is a foreign concept to many new McDonald’s cultures.
www.absoluteastronomy.com
- What does McDonalds need to do to address emerging health awareness of its customers?
"McDonald's ongoing commitment to helping consumers understand food/energy balance is an innovative approach," said Dr. Ro. "Fitness and food are two of my favorite topics and I welcome the opportunity to collaborate with McDonald's to help spread the message of balance creation to key influencers and McDonald's customers nationwide - particularly African American families."
To support the "it's what i eat and what i do ... i'm lovin' it" campaign, McDonald's has partnered with Dr. Ro to bring the campaign to life for African Americans, through an ongoing schedule of national and local appearances. As McDonald's "it's what i eat and what i do ... i'm lovin' it" brand ambassador, Dr. Ro will celebrate women and mothers nationwide and encourage consumers to take steps toward increasing their overall health and well being. Dr. Ro will educate consumers about the importance of food/energy balance and incorporating fruits and vegetables into their daily diets.
To kick off her new role as McDonald's "it's what i eat and what i do ... i'm lovin' it" brand ambassador, Dr. Ro joined R&B super group Destiny's Child, tennis champion Venus Williams, physical fitness expert Bob Greene, former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres and fitness enthusiast Donna Richardson-Joyner in a fashion inspired press event held on May 4, 2005 in New York, NY to debut McDonald's newest addition to its popular and great tasting Premium Salad line - the Fruit & Walnut Premium Salad. This fresh new offering includes premium fresh fruit: USDA #1 sliced apples and red seedless grapes, with a side of low-fat vanilla yogurt and candied Diamond(R) walnuts to sprinkle on top.
"We're very excited about this new addition to our Premium Salad line," said Bill Lamar, Chief Marketing Officer, McDonald's USA. "McDonald's new fun and colorful Fruit & Walnut Salad is a unique and convenient way to eat premium, tasty, fresh fruit any time of day, as a sit down meal or on the go."
The Fruit & Walnut Salad meets the nutrition criteria for healthy foods from Produce for Better Health Foundation (PBH), whose 5 A Day The Color Way program encourages Americans to eat a colorful variety of fruits and vegetables daily. The Salad also helps meet their daily requirements for a variety of beneficial nutrients, such as vitamin C, fiber, calcium, and omega-3 fatty acids.
Dr. Ro made her national debut as host of Black Entertainment Television's "Heart and Soul," a health and TV show geared towards African American women. She has served as a nutrition contributor to ABC News' "Lifetime Live," NBC, MSNBC, CNN. She received a Ph.D. in nutritional sciences and an M.S. in community nutrition and broadcast journalism from Howard University. She also holds a B.S. in Foods and Nutrition from Virginia State University.
McDonald's is the leading global foodservice retailer with more than 30,000 local restaurants serving nearly 50 million people in more than 119 countries each day. Approximately 70 percent of McDonald's restaurants worldwide are owned and operated by independent, local businessmen and women. For more information about McDonald's,
http://www.mcdonalds.com .