McDonald’s Pins Hopes For The Future On Hotter Buns

Corporate monolith McDonald’s has big plans for your buns. The worldwide bastion of quick cuisine is contemplating big changes to its business model and product line. Surprisingly, one of the cornerstones of their organization-wide reboot involves the baked bookends of customers’ favorite burgers.

According to Time Magazine, the fast-food chain has made the ostensibly crucial call to toast its burger buns five seconds longer which will apparently make the bread 15 degrees warmer. Increasing the heat on buns will supposedly transfer heat to the patties nestled within the bread. Additional changes are expected with regard to how the burgers themselves are cooked in hopes that patties will be juicer.

These seemingly simple tweaks to established preparation procedures are believed by McDonald’s execs to be missing ingredients in the company’s larger and more ambitious recipe for improved sales. Earlier this month, McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook unveiled a plan to revamp the overall structure of the company, placing greater emphasis on the role of franchisees in the corporation. Reporting on the forthcoming changes to the company, Fortune noted that McDonald’s has grappled with “a poor perception of its food quality and customer service.” Easterbrook attributes these issues to the company’s failure to adapt to major changes in the industry and in fast food markets in general.

Easterbrook has expressed a relatively broad vision for the future of McDonald’s via multiple platforms, issuing a press release, posting an online video, and holding a press conference to outline his new strategies. BuzzFeed News published excerpts from the CEO’s May 27 press conference, emphasizing his statements regarding the preparation of McDonald’s signature dish, hamburgers.

“At a more fundamental level we are recommitting to hotter, tastier food across the menu,” Easterbook said in his press conference. “It’s the little things that add up to a big difference for our customers.”

Fortune further noted that McDonald’s has lagged behind developments in the evolving fast food market as many customers have looked for healthier alternatives to the restaurant’s standard fare. Indeed, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have both announced initiatives to replace most of their menu offerings with all natural fare by the end of this year.

On the other hand, McDonald’s can effectively point to the experience of Iowa schoolteacher John Cisna who, according to a story reported by Inquisitr, claims that he lost 60 pounds by eating a “McDonald’s only” diet. In fact, the company has now enlisted him as a “brand ambassador” to help promote the more positive aspects of their overall product. (For what it’s worth, Cisna has yet to publicly comment on the above-noted plan to improve upon existing bun toasting techniques.)

It’s hard to imagine that hotter bread – slightly hotter bread, at that – will bring about noteworthy changes for a multinational corporation’s proverbial big picture. But then again, global capitalism is a system whose biggest successes are often driven by anomalies and quirks. While cooking times and dropped pounds are nifty talking points, though, the real numbers that matter for McDonald’s will ultimately appear nowhere else but in the company’s bottom line.

[Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]