Blogging from McDonald’s
Posted by Sarah Smee on Kids Cuisine.
We don’t write much about McDonald’s here at Kid’s Cuisine… mostly because we tend to focus on healthy, interesting food, and McDonald’s doesn’t so such a great job at producing anything meeting those criteria. However, a story I read today seems worth blogging about — McDonald’s has started a new program called Moms’ Quality Correspondents. The moms in the title are apparently “real moms” who have been chosen by McDonald’s to post blog entries and videos about what they see when they visit the fast food chain. Apparently, these correspondents are also “free to ask questions” and have the opportunity to go behind the scenes to visit kitchens and even food suppliers.
Though it looks like McDonald’s is limiting the number of correspondents to six, they are also looking for more parents to join the community and receive their newsletter.
The initial posts and videos are pretty interesting, though I am not entirely convinced they portray an unsanitized version of operations at McDonald’s. So far it looks like all the moms have visited the same one store in Illinois, and it was hardly an unexpected visit. So I would take anything they write with a grain of salt… or maybe the amount of salt in a small fry.
What do you think? Are you interested in what the correspondents have to say, or do you think this is just another marketing ploy? If other restaurants or food producers made similar offers, would you want to be on the blogging team?
I believe that the “correspondents” are portraying reality just about as well as the cast of Real Life. That is, not well at all. An expected visit from individuals who may or may not be on the purse-strings of McDonald’s Corp. doesn’t really sound all that trust-worthy to me.