> The menu team comes up with interesting ideas like including kale in salads. The procurement team and suppliers then try to get the menu team to understand the challenges. How do you bring kale to 14,000 restaurants? As one example, when they introduced Blueberry Smoothies in the U.S., McDonald’s ended up consuming one third of the blueberry market overnight.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2015/10/14/mcdonald...
I couldn't find any other source to back it up, but still wow! That's an absurd number.
In the case in animal product, there are almost certainly major operations worldwide that have been built and financed purely to serve McDonalds demand. They probably have to even build these out well before entering some markets.
They raise a lot of chickens in the US. I’ve hauled chicken nuggets or chicken breasts for McDonald’s in the past quite often.
I can’t even tell you where they grow blueberries.
It's still impressive. A 5x increase at that scale can be a phenomenal challenge. Where do you source the ingredients? Where do you build the factories (plural because at that scale you almost certainly have multiple locations in different geographic locales subject to different regulatory structures). Where do you hire the people? How do you manage it? What about the storage and shipping and maintenance of all the equipment and on and on? How much do you do in house how much do you outsource to partners? What happens when a partner goes belly up or can't meet your ever increasing needs?
Your comment is a great example of what the OP pointed out.