McDonald’s: Hold the Antibiotics

Overuse of antibiotics is spurring the rise in resistant infections, with dire health consequences.  More than 2.8 million anti-microbial resistant infections occur every year in the United States, and are directly responsible for at least 35,000 U.S. deaths annually. As we continue to overuse these drugs, their effectiveness wanes. Overuse can occur when a doctor prescribes antibiotics to a patient with a viral infection. But the majority of antibiotics useful for human medicine aren’t given to humans. Rather, meat producers feed them to their animals, often when they aren’t even sick.

We’ve now entered a period when the rate at which antibiotics become impotent outpaces the rate at which drug companies develop new antibiotics to replace them. Between this dearth of useful antibiotics and routine misuse of the drugs, experts project millions more deaths globally by 2050. Unless we change course, at that point, more people could die from antibiotic-resistant infections than from cancer. 

That’s why PIRG is calling on McDonald’s to honor its commitments to dramatically reduce the use of antibiotics in its beef supply chains. As the largest purchaser of beef in the United States, McDonald’s has a unique ability to determine the future of antibiotic use in the beef industry.

McDonald’s committed in 2018 to get on a path to dramatically reduce, and ultimately end, the routine use of antibiotics in its beef supply. Its first step was setting targets based on baselines the company said it would determine by 2020. McDonald’s failed to meet this commitment. Then, in 2022 the fast food giant released an updated policy committed to “responsible [antibiotic] use” rather than reduction, and set targets (which would be a dramatic reduction by industry standards). However, McDonald’s fell short of establishing a timeline by which it would meet those goals, or a commitment to share with the public the data that an independent third party would collect for them regarding antibiotic use. As such, these goals were not meaningful for the purpose of eliminating the routine use of antibiotics. To make matters worse, McDonald’s then failed to meet the only timeline that it did set — establishing a baseline for current antibiotic use based on collecting data for a year in 2023.

From past experience, we know that McDonald’s — and the fast food industry as a whole — can do better. In the 2010s, the public and groups such as PIRG petitioned restaurant chains to pressure their poultry suppliers to stop raising chickens with routine antibiotic use. Many companies, including McDonald’s, responded, and now we see significantly lower antibiotic use in chicken production. The industry made this important change, and is still thriving. Forward-thinking companies have also made progress in the beef industry. Shake Shack is among those that have already committed to antibiotic-free meat, and its business is thriving as well. So, we know that this can be done. 

To protect the efficacy of antibiotics, one of our most precious life-saving medical resources, McDonald’s must re-commit to honoring its 2018 pledge. The company should set an aggressive timeline for its beef suppliers to stop routinely using antibiotics except to treat disease and prevent the suffering and death of animals. McDonald’s must also pledge to having a third party collect data to verify that the antibiotic policies the company adopts are actually being enacted at the farms it purchases beef from. McDonald’s should then share that data with the public so we know that it has succeeded at this critical goal. 

If you want to join our campaign, please sign our web petition now to get involved.