Make up
your own mind

1 Expectations of the visit

When I first applied to be a Quality Scout, it was done out of sheer curiosity. McDonald's is a huge organisation and just the thought if they were willing to let people go behind the scenes and see what they did, then I wouldn't mind being one of those people. We've used McDonald's before; we have been customers in the past. It wasn't that I came in expecting the worst, but then again I wasn't expecting the best either. I came in with a relative open mind, but you know a lot of the urban myths you hear - I kind of believed some and didn't believe the really crazy ones. And I always thought of myself being a quite logical person, in that I could figure out what was right and what was wrong.

As a family so far we have visited the farm where the cows start their life, or the burgers start their life I suppose. Then we went through to the meat processing factory, and now here we are at the final stage, when the frozen patty comes into McDonald's, to investigate the journey it takes to end up on your table, or in your mouth. It's an interesting one because after going to the meat processing factory, everything there was so very stringent and strict and so automated, it was hard to see that any sort of errors would occur, because everything is so digitally controlled and so very strict. It will be interesting to see how it works in practise when you introduce the human element - people cooking the burgers, people taking them out of the freezer, making sure that they are only kept out for a certain amount of time and so on.

Hygiene is always a bit of a big issue I think - whether you're a parent or not, you are concerned about the restaurants and the places that you eat. You worry about a piece of food being dropped on the floor, is it just picked up, dusted off and put back into the food chain, or does it get thrown away.

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2 My Findings

After visiting the restaurant and when I arrived this morning, I was very much expecting that all of the good things I had seen up until now on the journey would be kind of be a bit pointless. I expected the restaurants to be sort of scuzzy and dirty to be honest, I wasn't expecting an awful lot from it. I am very aware of how much the restaurant turns over in terms of the volume of food production and because of that was expecting that the standards would have to drop slightly in order to accommodate that sheer volume. And I have got to say, and I said this when I came out of the farm and Esca, that I have been absolutely amazed. You saw all of the staff cleaning up as they went along.

They would make six or seven burgers and before they put the next lot on the grill, then they would wipe that down and start fresh so there was really never any kind of opportunity for anything to kind of fester for a while. It was all a fresh clean slate for each set of burgers they were doing, and I thought that was absolutely phenomenal. The systems that are in place are amazing. There is a commitment to making sire that the beef is at the right temperature, right from when I had seen it back at the meat processing factory right up to the very second it goes on the hot plate. And of course when it is on the hotplate, there are all the procedures to make sure that the beef is cooked at the right temperature and presented to the customer at the right temperature. And seeing all the different processes and procedures in place to make that happen is absolutely fascinating. It's very reassuring.

I feel very confident, I am happier, happier that I have ever been, to eat McDonald's and also to feed it to my children, and I wouldn't feed them rubbish. And if I have been behind the scenes and seen it all, and if I still feed it to them I think that is quite a good testament. Going through this whole process, from the farm to the meat processing to the restaurant, I can only say I have been impressed three times over. It's been an amazing experience and given me a lot of confidence in not just the quality of the food I buy but in the ethos and the way that the organisation works because that's quite important to me as well.

I think it is very important to have good quality food that is presented to you well but also to make sure that the staff are happy and that the staff are being looked after and that there is a commitment to the world in general, and I am getting that feeling, and that is really good.

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