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McDonald's beefs up local farming
In all the discussion over how to help British farming, buying a McDonald's meal is not often mentioned.
But McDonald's says it is actually quite a helpful thing to do. And one of its Yorkshire suppliers endorsed that message this week.
The fast-food giant organised a meeting at Wold Farm, Driffield, where farmer Paul Temple met George Micniewicz, manager of 16 McDonald's restaurants in Bridlington, Hull, Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Skegness, and the two of them met the people who come between them in the chain from farm to table.
McDonald's chips all come from McCains of Scarborough. And its "patties", both the standard beef and the breakfast sausage kind, are made for the UK and Ireland by Esca Food Solutions of Scunthorpe, which employs 126.
One of Esca's principal beef suppliers is Dawn Foods, which buys the meat in through abattoirs at Bedford, Ayr and Carnaby, outside Bridlington. The Carnaby operation alone employs 200 people and buys from 300 farmers to help Esca make two and a half million identical beefburgers a year. Vion of Malton is one of the suppliers for 300,000 pork patties.
McDonald's and Esca want, basically, just the front halves of the animals – forequarters and flanks of beef, shoulders and bellies of pork. They have experimented with steak sandwiches but could not get consistency and customers were not very interested anyway.
Wherever McDonald's goes, it buys locally – which here means 60 per cent from the UK and 40 per cent from Ireland.
Wold Farm is principally arable, like most in this part of East Yorkshire, but that means a steady supply of fodder and easy disposal of manure, so beef is an important sideline. Mr Temple runs his own suckler herd of Stabiliser crosses and buys in as required to finish 400-500 a year.
Prices still go up and down, although not as much as at auction. The advantages of the McDonald's connection come from stability. Esca only buys direct from the farmer, never at auction, so Dawn keeps coming back to him. It knows how many front ends it can sell to Esca for a year ahead and he can adjust his final fattening programme accordingly.
"Knowing the end user has taught me the value of consistency," he said.
"Once, I would happily have loaded a truck with five cattle of five different grades. But when I know what is required, I can work to that."
Equally important for him personally, he adds, is to be able to support an abattoir only eight miles away.
However, talking more broadly about the beef market, he is still not quite confident enough about price recovery to invest as he would like.
He aims for a carcass grading of O+4L up to R4L. Esca insists animals have been on their final holding for 60 days and not moved more than three times.
They must be reared for beef, not dairy culls, with no bulls older than 16 months permitted, to avoid trouble and stress at slaughter.
The rules are partly about 100 per cent traceability.
Peter Mitchell of Esca said: "I have had a phone call on a Sunday, when I was on holiday in Greece, saying McDonald's wanted the traceability on a box of burgers in four hours. They had it in two. It was only an exercise, but it was deadly serious."
Dawn and Esca police the individual cow passport system even more rigorously than Defra. It is a laborious system and Paul Temple estimates it costs 10-15 an animal. Interestingly, all parties agree that the computerised alternative – using electronic ear tags of the kind proposed for sheep – is not yet cheap and reliable enough.
The meeting ends with lunch at McDonald's on the Roebank roundabout in Hull. Local manager Stephen Marritt is asked if the customers ever ask about the origin of the meat. Actually, he says, they do, quite often.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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