Do you want salad with that?

BRAND MAKEOVER:Burgers are the company's DNA, but the trend is towards healthy eating so McDonald's is rebranding itself as a salad, cappuccino and wrap sort of place

IT’S JUST AFTER 10am on a Tuesday morning and I am making a pig’s ear of a chicken wrap in a McDonald’s in north Dublin. The lettuce is going all over the shop, I’ve put in way too much chilli sauce, there’s nowhere near enough lettuce and by the time the folding comes, I’m really not loving it at all.

While the staff in this Swords restaurant can assemble a perfect chicken wrap in less than a minute, the like of which will feature on McDonald’s menus all over the country from today, it takes me three times that long to get the messy mix together.

For the wrap to work, diners will need to catch a glimpse of all the ingredients the moment they open the packaging so my job is to make sure at least some of the grilled chicken (two pieces), lettuce (21 grams), cucumber (two pieces), mayo (three strips), and sweet chilli relish (seven short lines) are on show. I fail miserably.

Chicken and vegetarian wraps are being added to the McDonald’s menu as the restaurant chain continues its attempt to reposition itself and move away from its junk-food filled past towards a more wholesome salad, cappuccino and wrap-filled future.

The wraps may be dressed up as a healthy alternative but it would be a mistake to think they’re particular good for you. The crispy chicken and bacon wrap, for instance, contains 503 calories or a quarter of an adult’s GDA. A large portion of French fries, by comparison contains 460 calories while a Big Mac with cheese is 490 calories. The wrap also contains 2.2 grams of salt which is 44 per cent of an adult’s GDA.

The branch where these wraps have been on trial in recent months looks nothing like a typical McDonald’s. Fast food restaurants are traditionally harshly-lit and uncomfortable places. The owners would rather you eat their food fast and leave so more diners can take your place. McDonald’s has religiously followed the “ugly, uncomfortable, unpleasant” rule for many years – in fact it wrote the rule book – but it’s changed utterly now.

There’s no red and yellow – apart from some comparatively subtle arches – and no bright lights. The manically grinning Ronald McDonald is nowhere to be seen, the walls are plastered with pictures of tomatoes and lettuce and there is free Wi-Fi throughout to encourage people to stay.

Like it or loathe it, these are good times for McDonald’s in Ireland. Despite the recession it is expecting growth of over 3 per cent this year. It employs over 3,600 people, serving 150,000 customers a day, and gets 32 applications for every job it advertises. It hopes to widen its appeal still further through this rebranding which is the brainchild of Pierre Woreczek, the brand strategy vice-president at McDonald’s Europe.

The Swords branch is the first outlet in Ireland to undergo the radical transformation and all 82 stores will be similarly refurbished over the next 18 months. “The major goal is to create a bond with our customers and to make them feel happy, comfortable and welcome,” Woreczek told Pricewatch from his headquarters in Geneva last week.

But are the salads, wraps, fruit bags and soft-focus lighting just smoke and mirrors, a cosmetic exercise aimed at reducing the damage done to the brand over the last decade, notably by a best-selling book and a blockbuster movie? Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Mealwas published in 2001 and provided critics of McDonalds with a stick with which to beat the company. He lambasted McDonald's for the manner in which it relentlessly and cynically marketed itself to children. Ronald McDonald was said to be more recognisable to children than anyone except Santa Claus. Schlosser also offered a withering assessment of the meat packing industry; was caustic about the fast food industry's role in globalisation and savaged it for its contribution to rapidly increasing obesity across the developed world.

Things were to get even worse with the release in 2004 of Supersize Me, a documentary directed by Morgan Spurlock. For 30 days he ate only McDonald’s food and only opted for larger-sized meals when counter staff offered them to him – which they frequently did. He consumed 5,000 kcal a day during the experiment, gained 11.1 kg, his cholesterol levels rocketed and he experienced mood swings and sexual dysfunction.

While the executives in the corporation’s global headquarters in Chicago might beg to differ, the book and film may have done the company some service as they allowed it to publically revaluate its entire business model and roll out a range of apparently healthy options to show it had listened and learned.

This is where Woreczek enters the frame. It has been his responsibility to reinvent the company. “We have a strong conviction in Europe that before talking we need to act,” he says. “We are a brand which has learned a lot in the last three or four years. We are here to discuss and debate, even with our detractors.” He accepts that burgers and fries still represent the major part of McDonald’s business but denies the roll out of salads and wraps is a sop to people concerned about its targeting of children and growing obesity levels.

He says McDonald’s customers are too savvy to be fooled by such tokenism. “The idea that we will do hollow things, this is an old world idea. Our consumers are more clever than that. We are not going to introduce a wrap or salad to sell a small amount just to create a perception about who we are.” While McDonald’s insists its new ranges are popular, it won’t say how just how popular they are. When Pricewatch asked what percentage of its sales were made up of salads, the company declined to put a figure on it.

It is not like McDonald’s is turning its back on its burgers. Woreczek says that the brand should “always be loyal to its DNA. We are a burger company and we are proud to be a burger company. The moment you lose your DNA you lose yourself but you have to understand how your society is changing and embrace those changes.”

The company is very sensitive to charges that it has contributed massively to the rising levels of obesity among children in the US and across Europe, and Woreczek claims it “has been trying to be part of the solution”.

He points to the introduction of fruit bags, healthier drinks and its promotion of aerobic activities for children. But he says the company has to strike a balance between healthy options and selling the things kids actually want to eat. If that balance is not there, then the children will go elsewhere, he says.

Despite all the changes, the criticisms still come. The outspoken, controversial chef Anthony Bourdain has just published Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine To The World Of Food And The People Who Cook in which he describes McDonald’s as the “Evil Empire”. He accuses it of aiming its promotional budget “squarely at toddlers” as they know that “one small child, crying in the back seat of the car of two overworked, overstressed parents, will more often than not determine the choice of restaurants”.

He is turning his two-and-a-half year old daughter against the fast food giant by constantly referring to Ronald McDonald as smelly and hinting that he may be some class of child snatcher.

He also plans “to dip something decidedly unpleasant in an enticing chocolate coating and wrap it carefully in McDonald’s paper” and leave it somewhere for his daughter to find on the grounds that “an early, traumatic, Ronald-related experience can only be good for her.”