McDonald’s Corp. is giving its salads a big upgrade.
The Oak Brook, Ill.-based chain is adding red leaf lettuce and curls of carrots to its salad mix, which already includes chopped romaine, baby spinach and baby kale.
The idea is to create a more colorful and nutritious salad, with different shades of green, red and orange vegetables.
“Colorful produce is an expression of different nutrients,” Jessica Foust, McDonald’s chef and registered dietician, said in a statement. “The new salad blend offers at least 2.5 cups of vegetables.”
McDonald’s has been working hard to burnish its image as a purveyor of quality produce. Earlier this year, it tested garlic fries in San Francisco made from garlic that came from Gilroy, Calif., which is known for its garlic production. In January, the company touted its having served 2 billion servings of fruit and yogurt in its Happy Meals.
The salads play into that for a chain that depends heavily on families for its sales. The company offers side salads as an option for its Extra Value Meals.
The company said that it receives produce two to three times a week, and its salads are made every morning “to ensure peak quality.”
Last year, the company shifted from iceberg lettuce to a blend of premium lettuces. The red and green lettuces for McDonald’s salads come from Taylor Farms, Fresh Express and Ready Pac, which are known for their packaged salads, among other products, and South Carolina-based produce company McEntire Produce.
“The current trend is moving toward a nutritional-based salad,” Andrew Williams, director of product management at Salinas, Calif.-based Fresh Express, said in a statement. “Iceberg has been a staple of salads since the 1930s, but McDonald’s looked at its salads and decided it needed to innovate by adding more flavor and nutritious ingredients.
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“We’re also seeing a huge shift in the industry as a whole to kales, arugulas and spinach.”
McDonald’s same-store sales rose 5.4 percent in the company’s first quarter. The chain has been working on improvements to existing menu items in a bid to generate higher sales. It is cutting antibiotics from chicken. It introduced buttermilk chicken last year, and also started using real butter in its Egg McMuffin sandwiches — a move that increased sales of that product last year and paved the way for its successful all-day breakfast promotion.
It is also working on other ideas, including a test of fresh beef in Dallas, instead of frozen, for its quarter-pound burgers.
Contact Jonathan Maze at [email protected]
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