Word: coudreaut
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Dates: during 2010-2010
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...Coudreaut and his team spend most of their time playing with ingredients far more practical than broccoli rabe and celery root. Most days, they work with chicken and apples and beef. Facing the kitchen through a glass wall is a large sign reading "It's Not Real Until It's Real in the Restaurants." (See the best business deals...
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...
...franchisees are a particularly important constituency, since they pay for the equipment to produce any new menu item. They often have ideas for Coudreaut's team to appraise - the Angus burgers were co-developed with a group of California franchisees - and they often push back against odd-sounding creations like one of Coudreaut's failures, a breakfast Snack Wrap made with a crepe that held vanilla cream cheese and fruit. ("Why it didn't work is because we served it cold," Coudreaut says. "We serve hot food. Even our salads, we serve warm chicken on top.") The testing process...
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...