McDonalds Goop™ *note, the video in the first post has NOTHING to do with McDonalds*

Mark A said:
All I can say is that the economy beef burgers we used to get were full of gristle. This was probably 5-6 years ago, so they might have changed now. I've never had this with BE burgers and that's why I buy them. I fail to see how this makes me uninformed and ignorant. I'm basing it on my own experience.
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It was not to call you ignorant in any way. I do not doubt you feel they were full of gristle and they most likely were. My post was intended to highlight the chances are they were produced in the same factory as a "higher end" BirdsEye product and for everyone else reading this thread to be able to see that. The high gristle content could have merely been a one off error or even by design. I remember my GF buying frozen burgers from a discount store which equated to about 9p per burger. Even after a BBQ treatment they tasted like cardboard. This was the customers (BE, Ross, Tesco, Morrisons etc) choice for their value recipe. I wont be eating them again :)

Makunouchi said:
ShadowMan is telling us pretty definitively that it has.

One thing I'd like to ask though ShadowMan. We often hear about how fast food meat products have really high levels of fat in them, if they are using just chicken and nothing else (although as you say this differs from customer to customer) why is this?
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It will purely be down to customer recipe and their cooking methods. I cannot discuss recipes for obvious reasons but the meat part will be real meat. As you know there are different grades of meat as you get different grades of any product. Not all customers will choose the most expensive meats for their products. This is purely their own decision and is down to their target market, profit margins and total cost of production. Cheaper products use cheaper cuts and as such may contain greater quantities of fats. Fattier meat will come from birds raised in different environments to those without. The whole free-range versus battery etc. Battery farmed chickens and Asian/South American meats will be raised completely differently to British Free-range birds. Guess which costs more and as such would put up the price of the final product. :)

What I can say is that when I started, it surprised me how good some of the cuts were compared to other supermarket products for one of the major fast food outlets. High fat content for this product will mainly be down to cooking and the binding ingredients which make the coatings. The actual meat part is one of the highest graded we get through the factory.


Makunouchi said:
Thanks for taking the time to type that out ShadowMan, some of the posts in this thread have been really interesting, but the bit quoted about really stood out for me! I had no idea it was so many! Thinking about it logically (number of people in the U.K) I guess it's not surprising, but still, that's a hell of a lot of birds.
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There was a recent documentary about food we eat and where it comes from. 1 episode concentrated on chickens and how it has changed from a rare treat meat 60 years ago to probably the most commonly farmed meat in the world. Estimated numbers for total farm chicken population worldwide based on production figures equates to about 3 chickens (for food) per person on the planet. That is a little over 20 billion chickens making them the most populous avian variety on the planet by a long way.
 
Ah ok, different grades of meat, I see. So a higher grade will have less fat I assume. But is this because the chickens themselves are less fatty due to the conditions they are raised in, or because they leave more of the fat in with the lower grades of meat? If you see what I mean.
 
Makunouchi said:
Ah ok, different grades of meat, I see. So a higher grade will have less fat I assume. But is this because the chickens themselves are less fatty due to the conditions they are raised in, or because they leave more of the fat in with the lower grades of meat? If you see what I mean.
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I would guess they keep the fat on the cheaper ones as to increase the weight , where the higher quality ones will have less fat and will require more chicken meat to reach the specific weight making them more expensive.
 
Makunouchi said:
Ah ok, different grades of meat, I see. So a higher grade will have less fat I assume. But is this because the chickens themselves are less fatty due to the conditions they are raised in, or because they leave more of the fat in with the lower grades of meat? If you see what I mean.
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I would assume a little bit of both. We see varying qualities of meat coming into the factory and as everything is priced by the kilo both arguments are sound. We have a team dedicated to buying/sourcing and supplying flesh into the business. This keeps at least 2 or 3 people per factory busy for 40 hours per week. I dont have a huge involvement with them as a lot of our pricing info is restricted and there is not a lot they can talk about.

I do know that the foreign meats do command a lesser premium and are generally farmed much differently to the UK sourced birds some customers demand.
 
Makunouchi said:
Thanks for taking the time to type that out ShadowMan, some of the posts in this thread have been really interesting, but the bit quoted about really stood out for me! I had no idea it was so many! Thinking about it logically (number of people in the U.K) I guess it's not surprising, but still, that's a hell of a lot of birds.
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At Oktoberfest in Munich apparently half a million chickens are consumed in just two weeks (in one place), so I'm actually not surprised with 4 million in a week for the whole of the UK from one supplier.
 
[TW]Fox;17509085 said:
Thanks for bothering WJA96 - you can tell you know exactly what you are talking about by the way every post you make is grammatically decent and not full of emotion and hyperbole. You've done incredibly well not to get very frustrated with this thread.
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Feek said:
I've edited the thread title to make it more accurate. I've also really enjoyed reading the posts by WJA96 and ShadowMan, it's good to know what really happens.
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seconded

i've posted once or twice in this thread having a go at those repeating tripe, but you took it to a whole other level :)
 
bloodiedathame said:
Thanks for your reply, it's good to hear the alternative argument on these subjects, rather than rely on what I had seen and heard on various documentaries. I'm surprised documentary makers can get away with misleading people as they seem to have done in this case.

However I do still have some questions about MRM, the way you have described the process that Subway make their meat is vastly different from what I've been lead MRM to be. If they are steamed/cooked pork shoulders why is it labelled MRM? Or is my earlier comment and understanding about MRM (effectively minced leftovers) totally untrue/wrong?
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thing is, a lot of the production methods mentioned in these documentarys do happen. Products can be made here and sold abroad where there arent such tight controls. This doesnt even have to be outside europe. These documentaries specificly refrain from mentionning which countries they are sold in, because all of the shocking stuff, isnt done here.

And if they do cite evidence of it happening here, its old. Because again, the documentaries highlighting this created so much bad publicity, they stopped it because it was hurting sales.

Also if you watch documentaries like this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00txmm5/5_Really_Disgusting_Foods/

the cheap stuff isnt sold by the supermarkets, its sold to cheap take aways and cafes who didnt give a damn about what they are selling. But thats not whats in the supermarket ...

The documentary even admits that they arent allowed to sell sausages as sausages unless it has 30 % meat, and that what is considered meat is tightly controlled. The first product had to be called bangers due to the legislation. But the "bangers with beef" were sold at some random cash and carry, not tesco.
 
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ShadowMan said:
I do know that the foreign meats do command a lesser premium and are generally farmed much differently to the UK sourced birds some customers demand.
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I'm guessing most of the non-UK sourced chicken comes from Brazil and Thailand?

Some excellent posts by WJA and Shadow to dispel the wrong information/myths on here.

MrLOL said:
the cheap stuff isnt sold by the supermarkets, its sold to cheap take aways and cafes who didnt give a damn about what they are selling. But thats not whats in the supermarket ...
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After working in food retail for a while, I learnt that frozen chicken breast meat which some restaurants/take aways order comes in different 'grades', from 60% to 100% meat content. For the 60% products, I'm guessing the 40% is water and additives.

If I'm wrong, could WJA or Shadow correct me, thanks.
 
Since a lot of you seem to have very misguided views about fast food, if anyone has any questions with regard to final production of fast food (Specifically, McD's), I'll try and do my best to answer since I've worked there for a while.
 
It's not the chicken you guys want to worry about. It's the salad type foods. The amount of bugs in them can be quite suprising. After working in food production and seeing peoples bad habits, lack of care there is a lot more to be worried about than processed chicken nuggets.
 
bugs in salad is the exact oposite to what ive saw in documentarys...

that jimmy guy off the bbc did a documentary series about where food comes from and one was about salad type stuff
 
Even though all the meat is pretty much the same at the end of the day, I still swear by my local butchers for most of my meat based products and home cooked burgers, mainly as I like to make them spicy.
 
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