McDonald's Corporation: Managing a Sustainable Supply Chain—From Amazon Soya to Cage Free Eggs

This case provides an opportunity for students to consider how large, multinational corporations should respond when targeted by activists regarding environmental and social concerns in their supply chains. Greenpeace targeted McDonald's because its chicken supplier was purchasing soya (soybeans for chicken feed) that were grown on recently deforested land in the Amazon rainforest. Although its supply chain purchased a very small amount of this crop, McDonald's collaborated with other soybean purchasers to avoid purchasing from such cropland. The supplemental materials (in the teaching note and technical note) describe animal husbandry practices associated with egg production, including an activist resolution calling on McDonald's USA to shift to "cage-free" eggs, as McDonald's in the United Kingdom has recently committed to do. This material fosters a greater understanding of the trade-offs associated with sustainability policies being set uniformly by headquarters (as with the soybean case) versus delegating such policymaking to regional managers better able to tailor policies to local stakeholder preferences (as with the egg production policies). The case and these supplemental materials also force students to grapple with defining what it means to have a "sustainable supply chain."