The other day, I was flying back from a conference on Kauai. OK officially it’s a meeting (this apparently makes a big differece when filling out forms for work) and I was at the butt-end of the plane. I pulled up next to a big guy with a McDonald’s logo on his blue polo. Not exactly McDonald’s colors or what I would associate with McDonald’s colors. I settled into my seat and I asked him, “So do you get asked a lot ‘what’s really in the food?’”
This started an interesting conversation because he was the Regional Manager for ConAgra Foods McDonald’s Division. If you don’t know ConAgra, it’s a huge food company encompassing a wide range of brands that you’re probably familiar with. ConAgra, for instance, supplies potatoes for french fries and hashbrowns for ⅓ of the McDonald’s empire. Just for perspective, I learend McDonad’s uses about 7 billion pounds of potatoes a year or maybe to make it more graspable, one pound of potatoes per person in the world. That is a lot of potatoes.
It was fascinaing because we went into the food supply chain, how complex and intricate it is and how, again for McDonald’s, a company like ConAgra handles in different ways, shapes and forms, the supply of food to another large company. Yet McDonald’s has this formula that allows variation. For instance, in the South, restaurants can opt to buy the bisquit batter and make their own bisquits instead of using the frozen ones. I just wish they had the Sweet Tea here in Hawaii. We talked new products (there’s some pretty exciting stuff coming down the pipe) and a bunch of other cool stuff.
