McDonald's promotes water beds for cows, trees for chickens

McDonald's Corp. says water beds for cows and more trees for chickens will lead to higher-quality milk shakes and Egg McMuffins.

McDonald's European unit wants its more than 500,000 suppliers in the region to share knowledge of such new farming techniques to help control costs and ensure an available supply of food for its restaurants. The new practices also respond to consumer demand for high-quality ingredients in the company's more than 6,600 outlets in 40 European countries.

The availability of the food that meets McDonald's standards is going to be an "ever-greater challenge," Karl Fritz, chief supply chain officer of McDonald's Europe, said yesterday in an interview in Oxford, England. "Consumers will be more willing to return if they know the quality of the product."

The Oak Brook-based company has chosen seven suppliers, ranging from a lettuce farmer in Spain to a beef producer in Ireland, whose farming practices are detailed on a Web site dedicated to the supply program, called Flagship Farms. By ensuring the volume of high-quality meat and produce increases, McDonald's said it may be able to avoid higher prices of ingredients because of a dip in supply.

The pilot program will add six more farms this summer, and may be adopted by McDonald's units in other regions, including North America, Fritz said. Flagship Farms is run in conjunction with the Food Animal Initiative, a research group funded in part by McDonald's.

"The circumstances around farmers are changing very quickly and we have to raise our game," Mike Gooding, director of the research group, said yesterday at its farm outside Oxford.

Anton Stokman, a dairy farmer from Holland who is in the new program, provides his 200 cows with water beds to increase sleep time and blood flow. The animals also get foot baths each week to reduce lameness. The result, he said, is happier cows that live longer and produce more milk.

"What's good for animals is good for farmers, and this program helps me learn from other farmers as well and perhaps diversify a little," Stokman said in an interview.

David Brass, a U.K. supplier of free-range eggs, planted trees in the fields around his hen houses to encourage his 54,000 birds to spend more time outdoors, a practice he said leads to better-feathered, healthier birds that lay more eggs. About 95 percent of the eggs used by McDonald's in Europe are from non-caged birds.

McDonald's buys more than 200,000 tons of beef, 150,000 tons of milk, and 1 million tons of potatoes in Europe alone at a cost of 1.75 billion euros ($2.43 billion) each year. That scale means the flagship farms have the potential to help change the industry, not just the company's own supply chain, Fritz said.

"It means we can mitigate price spikes, agree terms for longer, and reduce the environmental impact of the demand for food," he said.

McDonald's Europe conducted a so-called carbon footprint study over the past 18 months that examined the environmental impact of the company's operations, from agricultural production to the gas customers use getting to its restaurants. The next step, Fritz said, is looking at how to offset that damage.