Consumers make choices about what and where they’ll eat based on quality, convenience and price. But higher up the hierarchy of needs is the requirement that the food you eat not sicken you—or, in a worst-case scenario, prove fatal.
If a brand needs to convince customers that its food won’t do the latter, it’s in deep trouble. McDonald’s entered that territory this week when news broke that its Quarter Pounder was the source of an E. coli outbreak across 10 states that had killed one person and sickened dozens over a two-week span recently.
While more cases may emerge, McDonald’s isn’t close to a Chipotle circa 2015 situation—at least not yet. Nearly a decade ago, the burrito chain dominated headlines for months when a string of norovirus, E. coli and salmonella outbreaks poisoned hundreds of customers.
The number of incidents gave the impression that the situation had spiralled out of the company’s control. It took years for the brand to fully repair its reputation, requiring a full-on management overhaul to convince diners that it was safe to eat at the chain again.
Unlike Chipotle, McDonald’s has long had a stellar food-safety reputation, which makes this occurrence seem more like an anomaly than an issue with its overall system.
Don Schaffner, a professor of food science at Rutgers, told me what most surprised him about the whole thing was that McDonald’s was the source of the outbreak. When he heard the news, he said “my jaw dropped.”
McDonald’s commitment to food safety goes back to 1982, when its burgers in Oregon and Michigan were discovered to have sickened customers. The episode didn’t get much press at the time, and it wouldn’t be until Jack in the Box’s deadly outbreak a decade later that food safety hit the general public’s radar.
By then, McDonald’s had already changed the way it cooked and handled its food, introducing clamshell grills that cooked its patties on both sides simultaneously to kill harmful bacteria.
The changes that’ve been implemented since then mean it’s now more common to see E. coli in restaurants linked to raw fruits and vegetables than beef. McDonald’s has identified slivered onions in its Quarter Pounders as the problem’s cause.
The fact that it quickly pinpointed the culprit, the source being a single supplier to three of its distribution centres, suggests that the company has a tight grasp on its supply chain. This also suggests it has a supplier issue rather than a problem with how its outlets are handling its food.
Compare McDonald’s speed and level of specificity to Chipotle’s handling of its E. coli outbreaks in 2015. Chipotle and investigators were never able to exactly identify what was making people sick.
The company reportedly struggled to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which ingredients went to which stores when.
“The system they have is not able to solve the problem we have at hand. It’s not granular enough,” as Ian Williams, chief of the CDC’s outbreak response and prevention branch, remarked at the time. Consumers were reluctant to return to the brand when it couldn’t even figure out what the problem was in the first place.
Chipotle took too long to acknowledge how serious a problem it had on its hands, take responsibility for it, and apologize. It blamed the media for sensational headlines and regulators for the way they handled the probe.
And the company’s cockiness on the quality of its food came back to bite it. “‘Food with integrity,’ a promise to Chipotle’s customers and a rebuke to its competitors, has become the source of much schadenfreude among both,” Susan Berfield wrote at the time.
For better or worse, McDonald’s can mostly skirt this issue, since it attracts customers more interested in speed, value and consistency than food provenance.
The bigger issue for McDonald’s will be the social media conversation the episode will provoke about what McDonald’s food, outbreak aside, does to people’s health.
The burger giant has taken swift action, pulling the Quarter Pounder from about 20% of its restaurants and putting out a statement from its head of supply chain for North America and a video from McDonald’s US president stressing how seriously the company takes food safety.
That message would have been more powerful had it come from the company’s CEO. But what was oddly missing from both communications was any sort of acknowledgement or apology to those who were sickened by eating its food.
That’s likely the work of McDonald’s legal department. But if there’s one thing McDonald’s can learn from Chipotle, it’s that showing some empathy might be the most important ingredient in convincing customers that it’s safe to eat at your restaurants again. ©bloomberg