McDonald’s Corp. plans to curtail antibiotics use in its U.S. chicken, a move that could help kick-start a broader food-industry response to growing public-health alarm around drug-resistant bacteria.
The world’s largest restaurant chain said that over the next two years it would stop selling McNuggets and other chicken products in the U.S. made from birds raised with antibiotics that are important to human health. McDonald’s said it would continue to permit suppliers to use antibiotics that aren’t deemed important for human medicine.
While the shift doesn’t apply to its burgers, McDonald’s is now the biggest company to make such a commitment on drug use in livestock. The change will apply to its more than 14,350 U.S. outlets. McDonald’s is adopting less sweeping changes for its roughly 22,000 overseas restaurants.
McDonald’s said it would work with chicken suppliers including Tyson Foods Inc., the largest U.S. meatpacker—which said it has already taken steps to curb antibiotics in its birds.
“It really is welcome news for public health,” said Gail Hansen, a senior officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, which has long criticized the meat industry’s widespread use of antibiotics. She said McDonald’s heft will require processors to change how chickens are raised, and likely make it easier for other restaurants and food makers to follow suit. “It will have a ripple effect probably throughout the entire food industry,” she said.
The announcement comes three days after Steve Easterbrook took over as McDonald’s chief executive, vowing significant change at the fast-food giant to reverse two years of worsening sales declines that culminated in the retirement of his predecessor, Don Thompson . Mr. Easterbrook in recent weeks has told analysts that he sees himself as an “internal activist” who plans to create a “modern, progressive burger company.” Observers have been anticipating possible changes to ingredients to improve consumers’ views of McDonald’s food.
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McDonald’s also said it would offer customers milk products from cows that aren’t treated with rbST, an artificial growth hormone. The announcements coincide with a McDonald’s meeting in Las Vegas that includes U.S. franchisees, suppliers and other stakeholders where the burger chain is discussing what it has called its “turnaround agenda.”
“People want to know what’s in their food,” McDonald’s U.S. President Mike Andres said in an email to franchisees Wednesday. “Some people say we’re too big and too stuck in the past to make big moves, but I can tell you that we can and we will.”
More than two million Americans a year develop bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics, which kill at least 23,000 annually, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public-health leaders say the epidemic of antimicrobial resistance is a global health crisis, and pin part of the blame on the meat industry’s use of the drugs over many decades—a claim the meat industry has said there isn’t enough evidence to support. The Food and Drug Administration in 2013 asked drug and meat companies to end farmers’ practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock to speed growth, though the guidelines allow them to continue using the drugs to prevent disease and treat sick animals.
A growing list of meat companies and smaller restaurant chains also have moved toward using antibiotic-free meat, and some have gone further than McDonald’s.
Meatpackers including Perdue Farms Inc. have curtailed their use of antibiotics in recent years, responding to consumer demand. Tyson, which sells some antibiotic-free chicken and beef under its own brands, said it eliminated antibiotics from its 35 hatcheries as of October. It says it continues to use U.S.-approved antibiotics in a small percentage of its flocks to treat or prevent avian diseases.
Chick-fil-A Inc., which has about 1,900 U.S. restaurants, said a year ago it would eliminate all antibiotics, including drugs used only to treat animals, from its chicken supply over five years. Spokeswoman Carrie Kurlander said a fifth of the chicken it sells this year will be antibiotic-free, and that Chick-fil-A is requiring suppliers to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to verify that antibiotics are never administered from the hatchery to the processing plant.
“It’s exciting to see another major player in the industry moving forward on this issue,” she said of McDonald’s.
Fast-casual chains including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Panera Bread Co. moved to antibiotic-free meat products more than a decade ago.
McDonald’s says it is the biggest restaurant seller of chicken in the U.S., and that sales of chicken items nearly rival those of burgers.
Keystone Foods, a unit of Marfrig Global Foods SA that McDonald’s says supplies it with 400 million pounds of chicken a year, said it supports McDonald’s “decision and direction regarding poultry antibiotic usage.”
McDonald’s move brings risks. Its sheer size makes big changes in its supply chain extremely complex. Upgrading ingredients can be costly, and McDonald’s ability to raise prices is limited because of stiff competition. “We are making an investment to do this,” Marion Gross, senior vice president of McDonald’s North America supply chain, said in an interview. She declined to say how much it is spending.
It is unclear how much the move will sway consumers. Len Perez, a 36-year-old graphic designer, said McDonald’s move was “great” but wouldn’t necessarily bring him to the chain more often. “I don’t come to fast-food joints for peace of mind,” Mr. Perez said at a downtown Chicago McDonald’s on Wednesday.
The move also could focus attention on McDonald’s continued sales of burgers made from cattle given antibiotics. “I hope that McDonald’s will now commit to using beef and pork from animals not treated with important antibiotics,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Still, she praised McDonald’s announcement as “excellent news for consumers.”
Switching to antibiotic-free beef would be harder. Beef is generally much more expensive than chicken, which limits consumers’ willingness to pay for premium beef products. Changes in the beef industry also can take longer because beef ranching is highly fragmented, whereas the chicken industry has been vertically integrated for years, with companies like Tyson contracting with farmers and guiding them on feed use and other practices. Cattle also live much longer than chickens, so rolling out changes over generations of animals takes longer.
Still, Ms. Gross of McDonald’s indicated its burger meat also could eventually change. “It is a massive change, and we wanted to start somewhere,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t looking to make advancements with other categories like beef.”
Antibiotics used in human health that also are administered to chickens by some producers include penicillin, perhaps the most famous such drug, and tetracycline, widely used to treat human ailments including pneumonia and skin infections.
The McDonald’s plan doesn’t affect use of ionophores, a group of antibiotics that aren’t used in human health. Many chicken growers include ionophores in chicken feed to help prevent a common intestinal illness, especially in young birds.
Some health advocates said there isn’t data yet to show whether moves like McDonald’s have led to an overall reduction in antibiotic use in livestock so far. McDonald’s announcement is “an important move and really rams home how the market as a whole is shifting,” said David Wallinga, director of advocacy group Healthy Food Action, who had met with McDonald’s officials in the past year on its antibiotics policy. But such corporate efforts “are not really substitutes for regulatory action,” he said.
Source: WSJ