McDonald's chef Daniel Coudreaut is rethinking the food part of fast food
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The franchisees are a particularly important constituency, since they pay for the equipment to produce any new menu item. They often have ideas for Coudreaut's team to appraise — the Angus burgers were co-developed with a group of California franchisees — and they often push back against odd-sounding creations like one of Coudreaut's failures, a breakfast Snack Wrap made with a crepe that held vanilla cream cheese and fruit. ("Why it didn't work is because we served it cold," Coudreaut says. "We serve hot food. Even our salads, we serve warm chicken on top.") The testing process is painstaking: it took two years for the Angus Third Pounders, the company's first new burger in eight years, to get on the menu.
When I visited his kitchen, Coudreaut made an exquisite endive and poached-pear salad with dried cherries and mustard-seed dressing. Say he wanted to put that salad on the menu. Among his first steps would be to go to the produce experts at McDonald's and ask about endive. He imagined the answer he would get: "Well, Dan, you're gonna have to get somebody to grow it. And that's not hard to do, but it's gonna take three years."
So then Coudreaut might consider mixing the endive with more commercially available lettuces, a step that would reduce the lead time. What about the mustard-seed dressing? You could do that even faster, plus it's a "great flavor combination with the cherries," he said. Except there's a problem with cherries: you can never guarantee that all the pits are out. Imagine the lawsuit from the guy who breaks a tooth on a pit. So you end up with only the pears. They are widely available and have a great shelf life. Coudreaut poached the pears he served to me in gewürztraminer. McDonald's could never do that for its outlets, but what if you softened pear slices in a poaching liquid other than wine — a step that would both enhance flavor and extend hold time? "Why couldn't we do a signature poached pear?" Coudreaut asked, getting very excited.
At just this point in our conversation, the McDonald's p.r. executive who was with us — an elegant British woman named Danya Proud — coughed rather loudly. Coudreaut trailed off. R&D is secret at every company.
Building a Better Big Mac
Of course, this is still McDonald's, which means Coudreaut's food must eventually be so simple that a high school dropout can make it. And so, culinarily speaking, McDonald's moves in baby steps. Before Coudreaut, the company had never asked its cooks to brush a glaze onto a chicken breast before setting it on a salad. Now glazing the chicken is standard, which is one reason the salads taste so much better.
Coudreaut's quest to improve on time-honored formulas is what led him to the Mac Wrap, a product that will be a good experiment in whether the eating habits of McDonald's customers can be nudged in new directions. Coudreaut's immediate boss, vice president of menu management Wade Thoma, had to push hard inside the Oak Brook headquarters to sell the idea that the Mac Wrap is, in Coudreaut's words, "how people are eating today — on the go, in smaller portion sizes." Smaller doesn't necessarily mean healthier, though. McDonald's is acutely aware of the criticisms about the food it has sold for the past half-century, but in the end, it also knows that very few McDonald's customers have read Fast Food Nation, a scathing indictment of the industry, or seen the 2003 documentary Super Size Me, in which a filmmaker ate only McDonald's for a month and — shockingly — got fat. Instead, McDonald's has learned to focus on balance: you add a healthy Southwest Salad, and then you add a rich Angus burger. Also, you don't mess with the fries. Coudreaut could never mess with the fries.
Still, it's nice to know McDonald's employs a dreamer. In addition to that endive salad, Coudreaut sautéed a very simple wild-salmon fillet for me — just salmon seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked in olive oil. Four ingredients. I asked why four ingredients couldn't work at McDonald's. Coudreaut thought for a moment and gave a half nod, half shrug. "Maybe five years from now," he said.
The original version of this article misstated that McDonald's has used rice patties as burger buns in China. It was in Hong Kong and Taiwan.