“I encourage McDonald’s to take what they are doing, and go a bit deeper, collect a little bit more data and not be afraid to talk about the challenges. These are complex issues, and no company is addressing every single issue perfectly… McDonald’s has the opportunity to bring a certain amount of leadership to the overall business community around these issues.”-Andrea Moffat, Ceres
From 2006 to 2008 –
The Journey Continues
We’ve picked up where we left off. This report covers the progress we’ve made since 2006. As in the past, we are primarily reporting on our nine largest markets in terms of number of restaurants – Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Our goal is to address issues of concern openly and honestly and in a clear and comprehensive manner.
You’ll see the word “food” a lot. Not surprising. After all, we are a foodservice company. But how we are striving to deliver responsible food has many aspects. Our priorities fall into six major areas, which are central to how we do business.
What’s important to McDonald’s and our stakeholders
Delivering responsible food demands attention to a complex web of important social and environmental issues. Setting priorities is essential to achieving sustainable progress. To help us identify appropriate priority issues, we consult a variety of sources, including:
- Our global business plan, strategies developed to implement it and internal and external risk assessments
- Company management and internal subject-matter experts from across the McDonald’s System
- Representatives of leading NGOs and socially responsible investor and employee rights organizations
- Reports and recommendations from government agencies and other public policymakers
What’s important for McDonald’s to communicate
As with our last report, we are using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework to prioritize key issues in this report. We’ve also engaged the help of Ceres—a coalition of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups that work with a select group of companies, including McDonald’s, to strengthen our corporate responsibility reporting performance.
Like many of our other internal and external stakeholders, Ceres and the members of our stakeholder group stressed the importance of communicating about our food and the many social and environmental considerations that come into play as we strive to bring responsible food to our customers.
Ceres has not endorsed or validated the information in this report but rather provided guidance on our approach. Throughout the development of this report, our Ceres stakeholder group has challenged us and provided expert guidance on what and how we need to communicate. We were not able to incorporate all the suggestions from the stakeholder team. For example, they would like to see McDonald’s set more specific quantitative goals and targets. For several reasons, this is a challenge for us.
Our decentralized business model, our approach to pursuing continuous improvement, our global “freedom within the framework” approach to innovation at local market and regional levels – all these argue for a less prescriptive approach, leaving individual business units able to set specific quantitative goals or targets.
We have explained this to Ceres and the members of our stakeholder team. We have all agreed to work together to explore opportunities for future improvement in this and other areas of our corporate responsibility reporting and performance.
About the way we are communicating
This is the first year we’re providing an online-only version of our full corporate responsibility report. Given the way people are getting information these days, focusing on the web makes sense. We can communicate more information, more quickly, to more stakeholders. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, we’re also including videos to help tell the McDonald’s story.
And, of course, less paper is a good thing.