a. Evaluation criteria for making recipe changes to existing menu items and qualifying innovations to be distinct to McDonald’s.
Food Quality, Safety & Taste
Serving safe, quality and great-tasting food in every single restaurant, each and every day, is a top priority and long-standing commitment of McDonald’s.
Recent Highlights
We refreshed the standards we use to develop and serve our menu around the world.
100%
100% of restaurants deployed the Digital Food Safety (DFS) checklist management system.
In 2025, we expanded training across our global food safety learning platform and launched initiatives during Food Safety Week to share best practices across restaurants and suppliers.
As consumer expectations for food and beverages continue to evolve, we refresh the standards we use to develop and serve our menu around the world.
We embed strict food safety standards and protocols in our processes, from food sourcing to menu development, packaging and distribution, and the running of McDonald’s restaurants.
On this page, you'll find information about our approach to this topic and links to related topics. For our progress and performance relating to food safety, see the Goal Performance & Reporting page where you'll find our latest Purpose & Impact Report.
Our Strategy
We work to source and serve safe, quality food and beverages each day, building trust as we strive to achieve food safety excellence.
Consumer expectations for food and beverages are changing, with increasing focus on taste, quality, and trust. We established a clear and consistent foundation to guide our decisions and help ensure that we can continue to meet and exceed these expectations at scale. As part of this, food safety plays a significant role in ensuring we meet our taste and quality promises to customers. Our Global Food Safety Strategy centers on three operating principles:
- Customer obsessed: Food safety is always a focus area. The safety of McDonald’s food, and that of the customers who consume it, is imperative.
- One McDonald’s way: Our food safety systems and standards, which are based on science and validated by external third parties, are designed to help ensure a globally aligned approach.
- Leadership: We are trusted business partners and advisers, helping to lead the advancement of food safety from farm to customer and to deploy processes to help us anticipate and manage potential food safety-related risks.
We execute this strategy through our food quality and safety work. Our actions help build long-term brand trust by focusing on three strategic areas:
- Delivering great taste and consistent quality
- Strengthening our food safety culture.
- Being proactive about food safety risk management and digital transformation.
We are supporting these strategic areas through the improvement of our standards and policies based on current science, industry best practices and consumer expectations. We are monitoring and identifying innovations and technology to help strengthen our systems and drive simplification to help improve behaviors and performance.
Delivering Great Taste & Consistent Quality
At McDonald’s, great taste and quality are at the heart of the experience we want to deliver every day. We recently re-established a common vision that calls back to our brand’s earliest days and is driving an unwavering focus on taste and quality. As consumer expectations for food and beverages continue to evolve, we refreshed the standards we use to develop and serve our menu around the world.
Our Standards
Our standards are shaped through a deep understanding of our customers, our global System, and our brand history. We leverage insights from across markets and Franchisees to help confirm that our menu remains both globally consistent and locally relevant.
These standards are a critical part of delivering McDonald’s mission: to make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone.
These three standards act as screens to guide cross-functional decisions we make about how our menu connects to our mission and to great taste and quality.
a. McDonald’s Core Menu includes approximately 20 items.
b. Standards for our Core Menu enable us to deliver consistent taste around the world. Our teams of quality experts across the globe evaluate our ingredients and finished meals, across suppliers and McDonald’s restaurants, to assess whether these standards are understood and met so that we can deliver consistently safe, tasty food.
c. We closely control any changes to the Core Menu to help ensure consistency across the System.
a. Uncompromising quality starts with food safety: from farm to fork.
b. We hold our suppliers to high food safety and quality standards. In McDonald’s restaurants, crews are expected to execute rigorous procedures designed to ensure that every meal experience is both safe and delicious.
These standards guide decisions across our System – from innovation to supply to execution in McDonald’s restaurant operations. We periodically review our standards to identify opportunities to help improve taste and quality, working closely with our dedicated category teams for beef, chicken and beverages.
Food Safety Risk Management
We take a cross-business approach to food safety risk management (FSRM), engaging with stakeholders all the way from farm to customer.
Engaging With Our Supply Chain
McDonald’s commitment to food safety includes the production of raw materials. We maintain strict standards in supplier policies and procedures – reinforced through virtual and in-person training for suppliers, farmers and other external stakeholders.
- Farmers: We work with various external organizations, such as the Global Good Agriculture Program (GLOBALG.A.P.), to help improve food safety standards at farm level and train farmers on the best food safety standards. GLOBALG.A.P. is a brand of smart farm assurance solutions for the certification of agriculture, aquaculture and floriculture production processes.
- Supplier facilities: McDonald’s raw material and food processing suppliers must comply with our science- and risk-based food safety and quality standards. These include the following standards: McDonald’s GLOBALG.A.P., SQMS, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and the Distributor Quality Management Process (DQMP). Furthermore, McDonald’s suppliers for raw protein sourcing must meet rigorous standards. To gain McDonald’s approval, these suppliers must demonstrate adherence to applicable requirements by passing regular audits (for example, animal welfare and food safety program requirements at abattoirs). To support suppliers, we provide online and in-person training on McDonald’s standards.
- Distribution centers: We work closely with McDonald’s global logistics and distribution providers, who utilize continuous temperature monitoring systems in the trucks that deliver food products to McDonald’s restaurants.
Product Traceability from Ingredient to Restaurant
We believe that it is essential to have product traceability within the McDonald’s food supply system. To help achieve this, we ask suppliers to follow McDonald’s requirements, such as the SQMS and DQMP standards, including establishing, implementing, documenting and maintaining food safety and quality management systems. This is in addition to our expectation that suppliers follow all applicable laws and best practices.
Advancing Restaurant & Food Safety
We set food safety expectations for every McDonald’s restaurant.
Audits by third parties help McDonald’s verify that key food safety standards and procedures are implemented and followed in McDonald’s restaurants. Follow-up visits by third-party and internal staff are used to help ensure findings are corrected and necessary improvements are implemented. To help ensure that audits are robust, we host calibration sessions with third-party auditing firms.
As of 2025, a new compliance report has been introduced to monitor the execution of mandatory restaurant audits. This report provides visibility on audit results, tracks follow‑up audits required after failed assessments and monitors whether corrective actions have been effective and completed within the required timelines. It is intended to enhance visibility into audit outcomes and follow-up activities to support ongoing compliance monitoring following identified gaps.
Embedding Technology
We seek to integrate food safety requirements into equipment designs, leveraging modern technology to help support automation. This can help improve food safety and quality, while also facilitating operational data integration.
For example, we started implementing a Digital Food Safety (DFS) initiative in McDonald’s restaurants globally in 2017. DFS comprises several phases to digitize food safety tasks in restaurants, helping to simplify restaurant food safety management and mitigate risk.
The first phase of DFS is checklist management, and this is fully implemented in all restaurants. The second is automating refrigerator and freezer temperature measures. A remote temperature system (RTS) can help ensure food safety and reduce energy waste by improving efficiency. To drive steady increases in RTS implementation, as of January 1, 2026, we have made this a mandatory requirement for all new restaurants, with full implementation across all restaurants expected before the end of 2027.
Bringing Supplier Training Online
Since launching a series of virtual training videos for all suppliers on the Digital Depot in 2022, McDonald’s Global Supply Chain team has been able to more effectively measure and track supplier adherence to food safety and quality management requirements. We also host webinars for Company and Franchisee employees and suppliers on topics such as establishment and implementation of programs that address food fraud prevention and food defense planning.
See our Purpose & Impact Report on the Goal Performance & Reporting page for other recent examples of training and supplier engagement.
Sharing Best Practices
We believe collaboration is important for standardizing food safety practices and requirements that, in turn, support greater consistency, easier performance tracking and stronger oversight of areas for improvement. That’s why McDonald’s aims to share food safety best practices at conferences with industry peers, academics, government agencies and consumer groups across the regions where there are McDonald’s restaurants. We use our internal food safety website as a platform to share best practices. During McDonald’s annual Food Safety Week, we refresh the internal site to highlight new content and examples. We also provide an overview of supplier best practices via a supplier portal on our internal intranet site.
We have launched a Best Practice Sharing platform, designed specifically for our Food Safety & Quality Systems community. This platform is a pivotal step in our ongoing commitment to share food safety and quality best practices across our entire network. It helps to find solutions for identified “problems to solve” faster, more easily and more efficiently. By coming together and sharing our best practices, we can work toward a more unified and robust approach to food safety and quality.
Evaluation and Intervention
Our Product Withdrawal Process
Product withdrawals involve removing food items from the supply chain before they reach consumers when issues are identified. Each market is required to do annual product withdrawal exercises, with mock incident scenarios to help test if the correct actions would be taken in a timely manner to manage an incident, such as when McDonald’s stops selling a product due to food safety concerns. These annual exercises include suppliers, distributors, and Company and Franchisee employees to help ensure protocols are current and that appropriate people are trained.
Responding to Incidents Within Our Global System
We have supply chain food safety incident management processes in place that help manage withdrawals and other food safety issues at a local level, when they arise, in a timely manner.
Monitoring Food Safety Complaints
Our markets track food safety incidents and complaints, aiming to capture the root causes of any issues so we can implement appropriate corrective action.
Food Safety Culture
Building on Our Food Safety Culture
McDonald’s focus on having a strong food safety culture is reflected in several actions, including:
- Restaurant Staff are trained on food safety during onboarding.
- Our suppliers are required to conduct Food Safety Culture Assessments to measure and track KPIs related to elevating the food safety culture at their facilities. This is in addition to ongoing programs with our suppliers to educate employees on safe food handling.
- We use webinars to train McDonald’s employees on current food safety, hygiene and sanitation standards.
- We developed a Food Safety Learning Platform that will provide essential training and information.
- Our internal food safety website is available to McDonald’s System employees globally to learn about food safety and includes videos featuring McDonald’s Chief Executive Officer.
- Each year, we celebrate Food Safety Week globally together with McDonald’s suppliers, which we use as an opportunity to share key stakeholder messages and best practices on different food safety topics. A whole day is dedicated to recognizing team members who go the extra mile at the “food safety wall of fame” – a display honoring their contributions.
- Conventions and summits, such as the McDonald’s Worldwide Convention held approximately every two years, allow us to share important information about our food safety culture with System stakeholders.
- Every two years, we grant Food Safety Leadership Awards to markets that have demonstrated food safety leadership.
- McDonald’s conducts a Food Safety Culture Assessment to measure food safety opportunities at different levels of the Company. Resulting action plans to close the gaps detected are included in the Global Food Safety priorities.
Customer Obsessed: Listening to Our Customers
Customers can share their experiences and thoughts through our global social media accounts and, in the U.S., our toll-free numbers. Our Food Safety team scans these insights for food safety-related comments. This feedback is integrated into our FSRM dashboard and used to help identify potential opportunities for improving the quality and safety of McDonald’s products and services.
Better Together: Partnering with Experts
A Food Safety Advisory Council, comprising McDonald’s internal food safety experts as well as suppliers and external academics, supports our FSRM work and provides strategic global leadership for all aspects of food safety and quality. The Council meets annually with our Global Chief Supply Chain Officer to review and discuss progress on food safety initiatives and to provide recommendations for the advancement of McDonald’s food safety standards and practices.
Beyond the Council, we are a member of the SSAFE Board, whose goal is to bring together industry, government and nonprofit organizations to help solve issues that affect food supply chain integrity. We are also collaborating with the International Food Information Council (IFIC), a nonprofit education and consumer research organization that communicates science-based information about food safety, nutrition and sustainable food systems, serving the public good.
We collaborate with organizations like Decernis, ScienceProtect and SGS FoodNexus (Powered by FOODAKAI), using their software solutions to help identify relevant legislation changes, public recalls and publications on ingredients of concern. These tools are being adopted by more McDonald’s employees across global and market Food Safety & Quality Systems and Supply Chain teams to scan and assess risk, strengthening the system and enhancing our ability to anticipate and prevent risks.
To further learn and share food safety practices and knowledge, we also engage in the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Stakeholder Discussion Group of Emerging Risks (StaDG-ER); we are a member of Serving Europe; and we collaborate with various academia, such as the University of Georgia (UGA) Center for Food Safety and Cranfield University. We are co-chair of the local group in the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region for the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI).
Related Topics
Responsible Sourcing
We aim to leverage our scale and influence to help drive positive impacts for people, animals and the planet throughout our supply chain. We believe we can drive the most valuable outcomes when sourcing our highest-impact commodities – beef, soy for chicken feed, fiber, palm oil, fish and coffee – while continuing to work with our suppliers across all categories to drive positive impact.
Nutrition
We serve millions of people every day, with a focus on offering customers the choices they love.
Animal Health & Welfare
We believe we have a responsibility to the health and welfare of animals in 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.
See our performance highlights and read our latest Purpose & Impact Report
