Prescott's Design Blog

Close your eyes and think of McNuggets

The other day I watched a great documentary series on the history of The Royal Navy called Empire of the Seas. Being a huge history nerd and Anglophile, I ate it up. And I was taken aback to hear about how the Navy was responsible for many of the pre-industrial innovations in the whole of Britain, including labour and economics. They pretty much created, by demand, the whole notion of supply chain logistics. Raw goods like lumber, canvas, grain, rope, chain, etc., were produced in quantities like never before — all to service the Navy.

McDonald’s global packaging system, by Boxer, 2008

And McDonald’s is pretty much the same thing. This dawned on my during Mark Carlson’s presentation at the FUSE Conference. Because of the global scale, McDonald’s requires gargantuan quantities of raw goods to operate. Obviously, beef, buns, and soda, and other things to eat, but also things like paper, straws, and napkins. When building locations, they’ve got to source tiles and ovens, and on the labor front, they innovated by bringing assembly-line-style practices to preparing food. For better or for worse, they introduced tactics that many other chains have copied.

McDonald’s global packaging system, by Boxer, 2008

We often underestimate the scale of a truly global brand. Think, for a second, about what a billion of anything truly is. Now realise that McDonald’s has to work on this scale every year, in many, many countries. Still think you’d want to take on a huge project like re-designing the global packaging system? What do you mean there’s no Japanese word for headache?

Whether or not we enjoy the food, I think we all have to admit that the global operations of McDonald’s and their global brand maintenance is an impressive endeavor.