A Chef at McDonalds? Part 2

Cited: Time

Continued from “A Chef at McDonald’s? Part 1“

Coudreaut was experimenting with some very non-McDonald’s ingredients on the day of my visit. He was working with celery root, broccoli rabe, wild salmon, hazelnuts and candied orange rind. There was a huge pot of veal stock simmering on a back burner of the Wolf. He seemed to want to prove his culinary skills, and he did — he made a delicious lunch — but what does any of this have to do with creating food at a real McDonald’s?

The answer is that every great manufacturing company runs a crazy R&D department, a place where mad scientists get to fiddle with toys and produce one or two breakthroughs a year. Coudreaut and his staff of 16 consider approximately 1,800 ideas for new menu items each year, but only a couple — or in an atypical year, as many as five — make it onto the menu. Few stay permanently.

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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.

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 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 in Hong Kong and Taiwan and now offers a whole-shrimp sandwich on a steamed bun in Japan.)

And 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 seen the immature soybean pods sold near her small hometown of Janesville, Wis.

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.

The 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 is painstaking: it took two years for the Angus Third Pounders, the company’s first new burger in eight years, to get on the menu.

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.)

So then Coudreaut might consider mixing the endive with more commercially available lettuces, a step that would reduce the lead time. What about the mustard-seed dressing? You could do that even faster, plus it’s a “great flavor combination with the cherries,” he said. Except there’s a problem with cherries: you can never guarantee that all the pits are out. Imagine the lawsuit from the guy who breaks a tooth on a pit. So you end up with only the pears. They are widely available and have a great shelf life. Coudreaut poached the pears he served to me in gewürztraminer. McDonald’s could never do that for its outlets, but what if you softened pear slices in a poaching liquid other than wine — a step that would both enhance flavor and extend hold time? “Why couldn’t we do a signature poached pear?” Coudreaut asked, getting very excited.

At just this point in our conversation, the McDonald’s p.r. executive who was with us — an elegant British woman named Danya Proud — coughed rather loudly. Coudreaut trailed off. R&D is secret at every company. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

Building a Better Big Mac

Of course, this is still McDonald’s, which means Coudreaut’s food must eventually be so simple that a high school dropout can make it. And so, culinarily speaking, McDonald’s moves in baby steps. Before Coudreaut, the company had never asked its cooks to brush a glaze onto a chicken breast before setting it on a salad. Now glazing the chicken is standard, which is one reason the salads taste so much better.

Coudreaut’s quest to improve on time-honored formulas is what led him to the Mac Wrap, a product that will be a good experiment in whether the eating habits of McDonald’s customers can be nudged in new directions. Coudreaut’s immediate boss, vice president of menu management Wade Thoma, had to push hard inside the Oak Brook headquarters to sell the idea that the Mac Wrap is, in Coudreaut’s words, “how people are eating today — on the go, in smaller portion sizes.” Smaller doesn’t necessarily mean healthier, though. McDonald’s is acutely aware of the criticisms about the food it has sold for the past half-century, but in the end, it also knows that very few McDonald’s customers have read Fast Food Nation, a scathing indictment of the industry, or seen the 2003 documentary Super Size Me, in which a filmmaker ate only McDonald’s for a month and — shockingly — got fat. Instead, McDonald’s has learned to focus on balance: you add a healthy Southwest Salad, and then you add a rich Angus burger. Also, you don’t mess with the fries. Coudreaut could never mess with the fries.

Still, it’s nice to know McDonald’s employs a dreamer. In addition to that endive salad, Coudreaut sautéed a very simple wild-salmon fillet for me — just salmon seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked in olive oil. Four ingredients. I asked why four ingredients couldn’t work at McDonald’s. Coudreaut thought for a moment and gave a half nod, half shrug. “Maybe five years from now,” he said.

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My Take: Now we know why McDonald’s has a chef! With so many meal ideas, they need to paid someone to figure them out. Then again, the same thing goes for advertising, they pay someone to do it. That’s why you see a lot of McDonald’s promotional T-shirts being sold all over the world. Of course, any business needs to have some kind of promotional golf shirts to build their brand.

There is something about McDonald’s that makes people remember the simpler times in life. Going to McDonald’s helps people remember when things were not so tight moneywise. They can dream about decorating their son’s bedroom with the aviation gifts he wants or dream about a new car. Maybe you and your spouse want to put in ceiling fans that look like wood propellers to give your family room and antique take look.

No matter what, visit the McDonald’s can not only be fun and enjoyable, but telling as well. Now it seems that they are trying to make their menu and even healthier, which will bring in even more people.

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