McDonalds Restaurants of Canada has launched an advertising
campaign thanking farmers and listing how much it buys from them.
And on another front, it indicated that it might soon try
chicken burgers in the United States market.
Whether it does that in Canada is a big question, given the
supply-chain issues it faced with supply management and provincial demands that
each one, not just Ontario, get a slice of the market when McDonald’s launched Chicken
McNuggets.
But on the advertising front, McDonald’s has commercials
featuring empty containers for its most popular menu items with the slogan “not
without Canadian farmers.”
Television and online commercials link consumers to its
Our Food Your Questions website.
The campaign says it buys large volumes from Canadian
farmers to make items such as Big Macs, Egg McMuffins and McFlurrys.”
“We spend almost a billion dollars on food ingredients
every year in Canada alone,” Sherry MacLauchlan, the company’s director of
government relations said in an interview with Manitoba Cooperator.
“Over 85 per cent of those purchases come from Canadian
suppliers… so a large majority of our expense for food is domestic.”
Every year, McDonald’s Canada buys 143 million pounds of
potatoes, many of which come from Manitoba, 52 million pounds of chicken, and
24 million litres of real milk and cream.
“We are the largest purchaser of ground beef in the
Canadian restaurant industry,” MacLauchlan said, noting its purchases amount to
67 million pounds of ground beef.
As for eggs, it buys 120 million fresh eggs, 76 million of
which go into its Egg McMuffins.
But the ads don’t say anything about pork.
