McDonald’s Steps Up Menu Offerings

On some level, the very idea of a McDonald’s chef sounds preposterous. Burgers, fries, the McRib is this really the work of a chef? The food at McDonald’s tastes partly of nostalgia and partly of marketing; the rest is surely salt.

And yet have you eaten at a McDonald’s lately? In the past five years, the company has started to serve genuinely edible salads, unlike those dry iceberg-and-carrot things it used to offer. The Southwest Salad, which appeared in 2007, comes with a lime wedge and a credible corn salsa. Similarly, the new Angus Third Pounders a line of relatively expensive and meaty hamburgers that have 66% more beef than a Big Mac and less bread are just as tasty as the triple-the-price burgers at T.G.I. Friday’s.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. After all the bad press in the early ’00s the company has been blamed, with some justification, for the global rise in obesity McDonald’s is enjoying a heady resurgence. Each day, it feeds some 26 million Americans, 2 million more than it did in 2006. In the past five years, the McDonald’s Corp. share price has jumped from below $30 to above $60.

To read the rest of the story, please go to: Time