Horn Talk Blog

In our last blog, we looked at attitudes toward food traceability among Americans and Europeans. We concluded that all consumers want reassurances their food is produced in a safe and humane manner. This week, McDonald’s addresses these concerns with a new advertising campaign focusing on beef and produce suppliers.

One supplier is Steve Foglesong, owner of Black Gold Ranch, a cow-calf, stocker and feedlot operation in central Illinois, who talks about his ranch’s commitment to quality and sustainability. The McDonald's campaign also features potato and lettuce growers. You can see all the suppliers at www.mcdonalds.com/suppliers.

This emphasis on suppliers represents a shift for the world’s largest restaurant chain, which previously focused on the quality of food rather than its source. According to U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Neil Gordon, the campaign is part of a larger initiative to improve transparency and communication with consumers. In an interview with Advertising Age, Golden said, “We acknowledge that there are questions about where our food comes from. I believe we’ve got an opportunity to accentuate that part of our story.”

Providers like Black Gold Ranch are secondary sources for McDonald’s. According to Advertising Age, the company works directly with 250 suppliers, including Cargill, Lopez Foods and Golden State Foods. In November, McDonald’s dropped a Cargill egg supplier, Sparboe Farms, following a Mercy For Animals undercover video depicting animal mistreatment. Sparboe has since conducted its own investigation, fired the employees involved and retrained workers in animal handling techniques.

What do you think of the new McDonald’s campaign?

Two relatively recent studies expose some striking similarities and differences between Americans and Europeans when it comes to food traceability. Clearly, consumers on both sides of the Atlantic take food safety and animal welfare seriously. One group, however, is much more willing to pay more for “traceability assurances”, while the other tends to take such assurances for granted. But this might not be the case for long.

Researchers from the University of Naples and the University of Massachusetts analyzed the results of several studies evaluating the willingness of European consumers to pay more for various food attributes. They found that Europeans were willing to pay 22 percent more, on average, for “food safety”, 17 percent more for “on-farm traceability” and 14 percent more for “animal welfare.” The authors hypothesized that Europeans are willing to pay more for meat-traceable attributes than North Americans, and cited the recent European trend of banning products containing growth hormones and genetically modified organisms.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Merck Animal Health funded a study of consumer attitudes toward beef. It showed that while Americans were not overly influenced by negative media coverage of safety, animal welfare or environmental issues related to beef, they do want reassurances that their food is healthy and safe, and that food animals are treated humanely. They generally trust assurances such as government labeling, and say they don’t need details about farm of origin or management practices, but still want” transparency”. Not surprisingly, American consumers react much more favorably to terms like “family farm” and “traditional beef” than to terms like “factory farm.”

Based on these studies, researchers recommend the beef industry align with consumer values by emphasizing “traditional” beef, with its legacy of assured safety and quality, produced by hard-working farm families. They also call for greater transparency in the production process, which undoubtedly includes management practices such as dehorning. From a welfare perspective, early-age disbudding with caustic paste is clearly the least invasive, least painful and most humane method of horn removal.

The United States appears to be slowly aligning with European consumers who are not only demanding more transparency in the food animal system, but are increasingly willing to pay for it. Studies like these illustrate the growing need for beef and dairy producers to live up to consumer expectations of quality and safety while reassuring them these expectations are met in a humane manner.