For years, people have wondered how McDonald’s cheeseburgers and those all-too-perfectly golden Chicken McNuggets are made.
Now McDonald’s is revealing its food production secrets—and wants its customers to ask questions.
The fast-food giant just launched a social media campaign called Our Food: Your Questions including "behind the scenes" online videos showing where and how its food is made. The videos are hosted by Grant Imahara, a former host of the Discovery Channel’s popular MythBusters show, and reveal answers to questions that consumers likely have about McDonald’s food. It's also inviting consumers to ask questions on its Twitter page.
"We're proud of the food we serve our 27 million U.S. customers every day, yet we know people have unanswered questions," said Kevin Newell, chief brand and strategy officer for McDonald's USA, according to USA Today.
In a video titled “Is your McDonald’s beef real?,” Imahara visits a Cargill meat-processing plant and asks the managers whether there are lips and eyeballs in the meat and whether they inject the pink slime into the burgers. (They answer no to both counts.)
The goal of the new campaign is to bring a new level of transparency to McDonald’s foods, an issue the company knows it must tackle in order to win over Millennials. A recent study by restaurant consulting firm Technomic and The Wall Street Journal showed that consumers in their 20s and 30s are defecting to other fast-casual chains, such as Chipotle and burger chain Five Guys.
There are still many questions over whether McDonald's new campaign will work, as some marketing experts feel it's too contrived to win over young, health-conscious skeptics. But it shows that companies are changing the way they handle public relations. Social media and the Internet give consumers more ways to interact and talk about brands. Companies believed to keep secrets or hold back information about how they operate or source their products won’t fare very well.
Instead, social media presents a great opportunity for companies large and small to open their doors and show a more personable side to their customers. As the new McDonald’s campaign shows, we’re entering a new era of corporate transparency.
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