Word: mcdonaldization
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...visited, Coudreaut was experimenting with some very non-McDonald's ingredients: celery root, broccoli rabe, wild salmon, hazelnuts, candied orange rind. There was a huge pot of veal stock simmering on a back burner of the Wolf. He seemed to want to prove his culinary skills, and he did - he made a delicious lunch - but what does any of this have to do with creating food at a real McDonald...
That's a highly corporate way to think about food - celery root is certainly real, so real that it's covered in dirt when you buy it at the supermarket - but McDonald's is, after all, a corporation. Coudreaut may be a chef, but his employer is no restaurant. McDonald's Corp. is largely a holding company, a middleman that works between restaurant owners and food suppliers. It provides franchisees with inexpensive, processed ingredients and - this is where Coudreaut's team and other development people come in - a guarantee that new menu items have been tested and tweaked and retested...
...anyway, there is literally not enough celery root grown in the world for it to survive on the menu at McDonald's - although the company could change that, since its menu decisions quickly become global agricultural concerns. Not long after he arrived at McDonald's in 2004, Coudreaut added to the menu an Asian salad that included edamame. The Soyfoods Council, a trade group, immediately got calls from consumers across the nation looking to buy edamame at their grocery stores. "Now you can find it in supermarkets all over," says the council's executive director, Linda Funk, who has even...
Nothing gets on the menu at McDonald's without the approval of hundreds of people: marketers, franchise representatives, engineers who specialize in food hold times, operations managers who know precisely how far refrigerated trucks can drive before food rots and money people who have read reams of market research that has relentlessly focus-grouped every ingredient combination that could be part of a Snack Wrap...
When I visited his kitchen, Coudreaut made an exquisite endive and poached-pear salad with dried cherries and mustard-seed dressing. Say he wanted to put that salad on the menu. Among his first steps would be to go to the produce experts at McDonald's and ask about endive. He imagined the answer he would get: "Well, Dan, you're gonna have to get somebody to grow it. And that's not hard to do, but it's gonna take three years." (See 10 myths about dieting...