Food Quality & Sourcing

Our Priority Issues

Food Safety
Serving safe and quality food in every single market, each and every day, is our top priority and a long-standing commitment at McDonald’s.

Nutrition & Marketing Practices
As one of the most frequented restaurants in the world, we help feed millions of people every day, with a focus on offering families the choices they love.

Responsible Sourcing
We’re using our scale and influence to help positively impact our planet, animals and the people in our supply chain, especially for our priority ingredients where we can have the greatest impact: beef, soy for chicken feed, fiber, palm oil, fish and coffee.

Animal Health & Welfare
We continue to make the health and welfare of animals a priority throughout our supply chain.

Responsible Antibiotic Use
We are working toward the responsible use of antibiotics in our supply chain, including reducing their use and not permitting routine use of medically important antibiotics in food animal production.

Strict food safety standards and protocols are embedded in everything we do, from food and product sourcing, menu development, packaging and distribution to the running of our restaurants.

We are listening to our customers and evaluating our menu to identify ways to evolve our offerings, while maintaining the great taste our customers know and love. McDonald’s will continue to take a responsible approach to our Happy Meals by offering balanced options and promoting menu items that contribute to recommended food groups, such as fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy.

The road to serving a McDonald’s menu item to a delighted customer is long and complex. Our global supply chain spans countries, continents and industries. We approach responsible sourcing with an understanding that our work impacts the livelihoods of people, the health of our shared planet and the well-being of animals. We believe we must respect them all.

Serving safe, quality food relies on animals that are properly cared for throughout their lives. At McDonald’s, this includes both animal welfare and responsible antibiotic use. We remain focused on the positive impact we can have by working in partnership with our suppliers.

Learn how we aim to preserve and regenerate nature, support biodiversity and engage the farmers closest to natural ecosystems, as well as how we are building business resilience into our business in a changing world. We are also committed to respecting the human rights of the people who work for us, directly and across our supply chain.

Recent Highlights

Food Safety

1,000 farmers globally on McDonald’s Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) standards.
1,959 third-party supplier audits performed according to our Supplier Quality Management System (SQMS) in 2022.
92% of our audited suppliers fully met our SQMS standards in 2022.
55,171 restaurant food safety audits (announced and unannounced) performed in 2022.

Nutrition & Marketing Practices

By the end of 2022, we made significant progress across all five Global Happy Meal Goals in our 20 major markets. Read the closing report on progress against our Happy Meal Goals produced by Keybridge (PDF – 1.8 MB), the independent third-party supporting our measurement and reporting, and our 2022–2023 Purpose & Impact Report (PDF – 7 MB) for our progress against each goal.

Responsible Sourcing

100% of the palm oil we sourced in 2022 was certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
100% of soy sourced in 2022 for the feed of chicken supported deforestation-free supply chains.
99.9% of our ground and whole bean coffee was sustainably sourced in 2022.
88.8% of wild-caught fish came from verified sustainable fisheries in 2022.

Animal Health & Welfare

The U.S. sources more than 88% cage-free eggs as of the end of 2022, while many of our other markets continue to make progress.
More than 91% of our pork purchased in the U.S. comes from suppliers that have phased out the use of gestation stalls for housing confirmed pregnant sows as of the end of 2022.
We are currently on track to achieve our 2024 Broiler Welfare Commitments across our in-scope markets.¹

Responsible Antibiotic Use

We have established market-specific targets for the responsible use of antibiotics for our 10 in-scope beef sourcing markets, representing over 80% of our global beef supply chain as of the end of 2022.
We’ve eliminated the use of antibiotics defined as “Highest Priority Critically Important to Human Medicine” by the World Health Organization in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. in our broiler chicken supply chain.

Related News

Reporting Across Our Purpose & Impact

This section of our website – Our Purpose & Impact – acts as the primary platform for our foundational approach, strategies and policies over each of our priority environmental and social issues, alongside recent progress highlights. In addition to our overall approach to issues, our goals and performance work in tandem to drive transformation across our four Impact Areas – the topics we know matter most to our stakeholders – helping us stay accountable for realizing our purpose and driving meaningful impact.

For a comprehensive view of our progress and actions in 2022, please see our annual Purpose & Impact Report (PDF – 7 MB) or our Goal Performance & Reporting web page.

Relevant Reports & Summaries

See All Current and Past Reports

Related Issues

Additional issues across our reporting include:

Footnotes

¹These commitments apply to chickens raised for sale at McDonald’s restaurants in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Russia has been removed from the scope of this goal based on our 2022 exit from this market.

Our Planet

We’re helping to drive climate action, protecting natural resources, reducing waste and transitioning to more sustainable packaging and toys.