CHICAGO — Under pressure from health and children’s
advocacy groups, McDonald’s Corp. is making changes to its famed Happy
Meals.
The fast food chain will add a serving of fruit or
vegetable to all of the meals, which are aimed at children, and shrink
the portion of French fries.
The changes, announced Tuesday, will take effect in
September in some markets and then roll out to all 14,000 McDonald’s
restaurants in the U.S. by April.
McDonald’s said it first experimented with cutting fries entirely from the Happy Meals, but children and parents rebelled.
“People come to McDonald’s and, first of all, they
want the choice and the control to be theirs, but their expectation of a
Happy Meal does include a fry,” said Jan Fields, president of
McDonald’s USA. “When we did it without fries, there was a huge
disappointment factor.”
The new French fry holders in Happy Meals will
contain 1.1 ounces of potatoes, down from 2.4. Apple slices will often
be included as the healthful side dish, but it could also be carrots,
raisins, pineapple slices or mandarin oranges, depending on the time of
year and the region in which they’re being served, Fields said.
Although subject to variation depending on what’s
ordered, the new meals will represent, on average, a 20 percent decrease
in calories, the chain said.
Fields said Happy Meal prices will not go up as a
result of the changes. But the chain has raised prices this year as a
result of soaring commodity costs.
As the world’s largest restaurant chain by sales,
McDonald’s has been under intense scrutiny for the nutritional quality
of its food and its marketing to children. Critics have strongly
challenged the chain’s practice of selling kids’ meals that include a
toy, connecting it to the nation’s obesity crisis.
Last year, San Francisco and Santa Clara County,
Calif., banned toys with meals at fast food restaurants if the meals
didn’t meet certain nutritional criteria. Similar legislation has been
proposed in New York.
“We know we’re a leader and we know we need to be
part of the solution,” McDonald’s spokeswoman Danya Proud said. “But we
can’t be looked at as providing the only solution.”
The business strategy for McDonald’s is to make
parents feel less guilty about feeding fast food to their children, so
they’ll become more frequent customers.
“People tell us they want to feel good about visiting
us regularly, about the food options that we serve, and want to visit
us even more often,” Fields said.
McDonald’s revamped its Happy Meal choices in 2004 by
offering soda alternatives, such as 1 percent milk, with a meal of
hamburger, cheeseburger or chicken nuggets and fries. It also offered an
option of replacing fries with sliced apples served with low-fat
caramel sauce.
In 2006, McDonald’s began advertising a version of
its Happy Meal that included chicken nuggets and the apple slices,
marketed as Apple Dippers because of the caramel sauce. The result is
that 88 percent of McDonald’s customers know about the fruit option with
Happy Meals, according to the company. But only 11 percent of kids
meals are ordered with apples instead of fries.
In the revamped Happy Meals, the caramel sauce will not be offered.
Geeta Maker-Clark, a family physician at NorthShore
University HealthSystem in Illinois, described the changes as “really
good steps.”
“I applaud any move toward including more whole food
into a heavily processed meal,” she said. “Bringing a whole food into it
shifts the pendulum toward something more healthy, and I applaud the
decreased portion sizes.”
Beginning next year, the company said it will include
a nutritional message in any advertising, marketing or packaging
materials directed at children.
McDonald’s is also pledging to reduce by 15 percent
the amount of sodium in its food. The company recently reduced sodium in
its chicken nuggets by 10 percent, on top of a 13% reduction in sodium
after the nuggets were changed from dark meat to white meat.
The chain said it will work toward additional
reductions in sugars, saturated fat and calories by 2020 and has hired
an unidentified third-party organization to report on its progress.
“This seems like good leadership in the industry and
one that should help the brand maintain its leading position with young
families,” said David Palmer, an analyst with UBS. Darren Tristano,
executive vice president of Technomic, a restaurant industry consultancy
in Chicago, said that although McDonald’s is clearly trying to strike a
balance between nutrition and cravings, “consumers are going to chose
what they want.” And that usually means something fried.
Tristano said the estimate that 11 percent of customers ordering Apple Dippers for their children “sounds high.”
“I think you’re going to get a good reaction from
kids who like apples,” Tristano said of the new meal. “But ultimately I
think we’re going to see a good bit of apples wasted from kids who just
refuse to eat them.”
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