MAAP background
McDonald’s is proud of the fact that we have always worked closely in partnership with our direct suppliers, and consider them to be a partner in our business. It is impossible, however, to have the same close relationships with our farm producers because of the large numbers involved.
McDonald’s uses farm produce from over half a million European farmers in our European menu items. Each year they provide over:
- 200,000 tons of beef
- 100,000 tons of wheat
- 113,000 tons oil seeds
- 150,000 tons milk
- 60,000 tons lettuce
- 50,000 tons chicken meat
- 1 million tons of potatoes.
The number of farmers, and the volumes of material supplied make it challenging to maintain a close relationship with each business.
But in order to provide quality, safe meals to our customers we need to use quality raw ingredients, produced in a sustainable and ethically-acceptable environment.
Transparency within our supply chain is crucial so that we can trace the history of the raw materials that make our products. One way we do this is by sourcing from farms that are members of existing agricultural assurance schemes, such as GlobalGap, QS Beef Germany, Assured British Meat etc.
It has always been our practice to support and promote farm assurance schemes wherever possible, and to work with them to improve their standards. However from 2001 we went one step further and developed the McDonald’s Agricultural Assurance Programme (MAAP) – an internal reference tool used to assess the relative standards in farm assurance schemes used in our supply chain, and to help drive more alignment and continuous improvement in those schemes. We have a database which rates over 300 European farm assurance schemes against our MAAP standards, enabling us to understand overall compliance with these expectations.
The MAAP framework enables us to monitor and manage food safety, quality, ethics and sustainability through a series of targets for our direct suppliers.