McDonald's – Ruby Kaufman – 2021

Goals

McDonald’s Corporation is the world’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 39,000 locations in 119 countries. As such, annual environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting at McDonald’s is a complex orchestration of strategy development and planning, data collection, content creation, and stakeholder alignment.

McDonald’s engaged Ruby Kaufman to broadly support 2021 ESG reporting, ultimately helping to strengthen McDonald’s position as a sustainability and ESG leader.

Solutions

Ruby furthered McDonald’s ESG agenda in two key ways:

• Reporting: Ruby actively contributed to McDonald’s 2021 ESG reports – namely, CDP Disclosures, SASB Index, and McDonald’s own Purpose & Impact reporting suite. This mainly involved updating information on progress (data, case studies) via company subject matter experts and external partners, researching best practices, drafting, and harmonizing content across reports and consolidating lessons learned.
• Industry Research: To understand areas of opportunity for McDonald’s, Ruby conducted ESG intelligence and benchmark research. For these exercises, Ruby worked with corporate strategy to investigate the ESG and disclosures landscape to help inform McDonald’s positioning. She also developed a tool for mapping of ESG standards / benchmarks to inform McDonald’s reporting.

Potential Impact

McDonald’s 2020-2021 Purpose and Impact Reporting Suite, which includes the SASB Index and links to CDP (submitted in July 2021), was released publicly in August 2021. This reporting demonstrates McDonald’s progress across a range of ESG priorities over the prior year in support of McDonald’s commitment to feed and foster communities.

Moreover, additional recommendations informed McDonald’s with defined ESG reporting opportunities, such as potential organizations to engage with and metrics/ indicators to prioritize for reporting.