Down to the Last Cream Puff

"The second most profitable national market for McDonald’s is now France. The Great Satan of dietary mondialisation is now woven into the fabric of French life and, while Steinberger has no taste for fast-food malbouffe, he also has no time for the facile notion that this is a story about Americanisation: ‘The quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin’ it – the architects of McDonald’s strategy in France were French.’ The French buy ‘Les Big Macs’ because they like them. McDonald’s French executives have successfully argued that it is a French company, supplying emerging French needs, adjusting its facilities to French habits, and sourcing its beef, bread and condiments from impeccably French sources. One of McDonald’s advertising campaigns posed the question ‘D’où vient ton McDo?’, since the company was happy to supply the answer..."