The US Department of Agriculture said late on Wednesday that fresh onions were the likely source of the outbreak.
Past E. coli outbreaks have hampered sales at big fast-food restaurants as customers avoid the affected chains for fear of illness. Regulators are still investigating whether McDonald’s beef patties could be affected, but E. coli is killed in beef when cooked properly, whereas the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is served with raw, slivered onions.
McDonald’s has pulled the Quarter Pounder from about one-fifth of its US restaurants, including in Colorado, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, and in parts of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
“We’ve been told by corporate to not use any onions going forward for the foreseeable future,” Maria Gonzales, the on-duty manager inside a Burger King in Longmont, Colorado, said on Wednesday. “They’re off our menu.”
McDonald’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
McDonald’s has moved quickly to try to contain the damage while also trying to reassure customers of its efforts. That may be critical – previous outbreaks in 2015 at Chipotle Mexican Grill and in 1993 at Jack in the Box caused sales at those companies to drop sharply for several quarters.
David Tarantino, an analyst at Baird Equity Research, downgraded McDonald’s shares to “neutral” late on Wednesday. “We are concerned that reports of an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s restaurants in multiple US states could pose a major threat to consumer sentiment” and thus hurt the US comparable-store sales, he said.
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Publish date : 2024-10-25 01:08:00
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