Most people associate McDonalds with the traditional meat and potatoes menu that they started with, the traditional cheeseburger and french fries. However, in recent times the Oak Brook based chain, with its 68 million daily customers in over 119 countries has expanded their menu to include items that can satisfy all different types of taste buds By implementing these new items, like the snack wraps, angus burgers, and steak bagels McDonalds has tried to cover all territories of the fast food market. They have even offered rib sandwiches and the most recent offering of mighty wings (traditional chicken wings). Since 2007, McDonalds has added over 60 items to their menu.
Lately, however McDonalds has started to eliminate items off of their menu. Starting with the Angus Burger last month, McDonalds claims that 4 more items will soon be off their menu including the Caesar salads, McSkillet Burritos, Southern Style Biscuits and steak bagels. This is in an effort to better manage a menu that has grown in the past 7 years.
Because McDonalds is such an excellent example of quality and process management, this article serves as a good example to look at the way the McDonalds handles and controls its processes. The traditional idea of McDonalds was that it was a company that could do the basics and do them better than anyone else meaning serve traditional Cheeseburgers and fries in a quick, clean, and friendly restaurant and atmosphere better than any of its competitors. Clearly it has done this as it is the biggest fast food chain in the world and as a matter of necessity for an ever expanding target market, the menu has swollen to a size the original owners would have never thought.
Therein lies obvious potential problems which I believe McDonalds has realized. By having so many different products, it becomes difficult to effectively offer the same consistent quality of all of these items across the board. This I believe is because of the numerous different processes each different item must go through before it reaches the consumer. This ranges from ingredient storage, cooking, preparing, and delivery. This also can cause process variation in McDonalds training process as the menu becomes harder to master for its employees. With new items so frequently being added, McDonalds lends itself to a host of possible errors in everyday preparation of these items to its customers.
What McDonalds is doing by reducing its menu items slowly is going back to basics somewhat. By creating a more manageable menu, McDonalds can better focus on improving on its continued improvement of processes already associated with existing menu items. By Improving their base menu items, McDonalds should see an increase in customer satisfaction across the multiple countries it occupies.
Do you think that eliminating the numerous menu items listed and more will help McDonalds achieve a higher quality standard for its other items and improve more so on its current operations? How else could this move help McDonalds achieve higher quality across the company.
Sources:
Crains ” More food disappearing from McDonalds”
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130517/BLOGS08/130519794/more-food-disappearing-from-mcdonalds-menu
” WikiPedia McDonalds”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald’s
Bloomberg New “McDonalds Cutting its Menu”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mcdonalds-reduce-menu-bloomberg-reports-101556997.html
Business Insider “McDonalds to Start Cutting Menu Items”
http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-to-start-cutting-menu-items-2013-5
McDonald’s has large amounts of money and is very profitable, which gives them a lot of room to be able to try out any food items they want to see if it’s a success. If it fails then it gets cut from the menu. Yes they lost money by doing so but when one item becomes a success then McDonald’s makes a huge profit to cover those smaller losses. The other day I stopped into McDonald’s I told the worker I would like to order chicken selects. She replied saying “we no longer sell chicken selects.” I was devastated but that certain product must have not been profitable for them as much as other products. McDonald’s is always trying to update their menu to fit the market, people’s wants and society’s judgments. They try out more breakfast items, healthier items on the menu and adapted kid’s meals that offer better food. But no one goes to McDonald’s to get really healthy food, so I still believe their good ol’ greasy food is the most profitable even though there has been a recent push for healthier items. They cut items that aren’t big cash cows, but they still offer healthier foods even if their most of their profit is probably generated from items such as fries.
I think that even besides that fact that McDonald’s has so much money, the company can still make whatever changes they want to try without having a large effect on them. McDonald’s has created a brand name of fast, unhealthy (no matter what changes they try), cheap food. The “healthy” options they offer may be healthier than their normal food but are not healthy in a conscious eater’s terms. No matter how often or how much McDonald’s changes their menus, they will continue to be a leader in the fast, cheap food market. In addition, I believe they will never be able to get rid of the original cheeseburger and fries that customers greatly enjoy.