McDonald’s Transparency Campaign Failing With The McRib And French Fries, Why Is That?

Earlier this year, McDonald’s started to suffer the after-effects for the lack of transparency when it comes to their food. With more consumers — especially families with children — being more organic-cautious and avoiding genetically modified organisms (GMO), other restaurants who follow the health trend are getting a boost in their business.

The Inquisitr reported on such news, where the fast-food business is generally dying because the fast-casual business provides the nutritional content consumers now want. Panera Bread is a prime example providing delicious “traditional restaurant style” food at fast-food restaurant speed without the use of 86 additives usually found in fast food. Now to be fair, not all fast-food restaurants are alike, as proven by Chick-fil-A, a company providing tasty and healthy organic food that children love — more so than a Happy Meal.

As a result, McDonald’s is trying to entice the organic health crowd with a transparency campaign in which they show what happens behind the scenes in their food factories. However, french fries are still not included in the campaign and the McRib has been found guilty of generalizing information. Why is that?

The True Activist provided insight on the two popular McDonald’s products, with details why they are either omitted or generalized in the campaign. The first is McDonald’s french fries. If these fries are truly organic and healthy, they would consist of only three ingredients: potatoes, oil, and salt. Thanks to Real Farmacy, we know that is not the case. The ingredients used to make or prepare the fries includes the GMOs canola oil and hydrogenated soybean oil, safflower oil (root cause of diseases with inflammation), natural flavors (contain monosodium glutamate or MSG), dextrose (artificial sugar), citric acid (made from GMO black mold), and TBHQ (petroleum byproduct).

The fact so many bad ingredients are in one of the simplest foods to make is terrifying. However, McDonald’s is not bothering with any of the backlash from the french fry critics because they are concentrating on promoting their McRib sandwich. This means they are also trying to be transparent about it too. The Huffington Post reports McDonald’s attempt to do this. Probably the biggest reason why McDonald’s wants to “set the record straight” is because of a picture of a “frozen McRib patty” that caused questions to arise, especially when it made its rounds on social media. To help counter the negative backlash of the viral picture, the video shows that McDonald’s invited Wes Ballamy, a high school teacher who previously tweeted what he thought about a frozen McRib patty, to one of their factories to show how they are made.

To be fair, McDonald’s seemed to be transparent because the picture Wes Ballamy saw of a McRib patty most likely was a McRib patty. There is a segment in the video showing the ground pork being molded into the famous McRib patty shape before they are misted with water for flash freezing. The end result is very similar to the viral picture. McDonald’s, however, wanted to push what goes into said McRib patties before its flash frozen state. It helped that they were at least transparent that they use dextrose as one of the ingredients being added to the ground pork.

There is one peculiar part that should be noted: the listing of ingredients abruptly ends at a generalization of “other preservatives.” Thanks again to Real Farmacy, the preservatives have been detailed. Upon their exposure, it probably makes sense why McDonald’s chose to generalize them in the first place. There is butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), an additive that the United States Department of Health and Human Services considers a carcinogen or cancer-causing substance through studies by the Cancer for Science of Public Interest (CSPI). Propyl gallate is like BHA — the CSPI found it to be cancer-causing too. Finally, there is citric acid which, as we stated earlier, is most likely made from GMO black mold.

If McDonald’s really wants to appeal to the organic, non-GMO crowd, all they need to do is change all of their products to be organic and non-GMO. When that happens, being transparent wouldn’t be such a hard thing to do. Until then, it seems that the most popular fast-food restaurant has to treat their transparency like foodstuffs in a cafeteria: pick what to show and ignore the rest.

Now that you’ve seen the report on the failure of McDonald’s transparency, what are your views about it? Are you actually pleased to see the Golden Arches showing some form of integrity or are you not surprised that the multi-billion dollar company would omit certain information to make themselves look good to the public eye?

[Images via Bing]