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...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 so they can come out looking and tasting roughly the same in every McDonald's in every part of America. (Teams led by other chefs work on other continents; that's why McDonald's has used rice patties as burger buns...
...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...
...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...