NORTH BALTIMORE, Ohio – McDonald’s owner/operators and elected officials celebrated the restaurant chain’s ties to Ohio’s agriculture industry on Sept. 19 with an event at the National Beef facility. National Beef has been in operation since 1974 and has been supplying McDonald’s for almost 52 years.

National Beef produces roughly 5.8 million hamburger patties a day and supplies over 4,000 McDonald’s restaurants in Ohio with more than 600 patties, said Bob Wilt, National Beef’s vice president of business in North Baltimore.

While the North Baltimore plant is not a slaughter facility, National Beef has three slaughter facilities and burger processing facilities in other parts of the country. However, the North Baltimore plant is the only one that supplies patties to McDonald’s.

Jeff Chamness, one of McDonald’s owner/operators, said they own and operate 19 McDonald’s locations within the Cincinnati and Columbus areas. They have 1,200 employees and do a lot of business in rural Ohio.

“We purchase a lot of products here in Ohio,” Chamness said. “From the supply-chain side, there are five different bakeries in Ohio, and a lot of grain is purchased from Ohio; almost 26 million pounds of wheat is purchased every year.”

McDonald’s also purchases 2 million pounds of flour, 2.2 million pounds of butter, 81 million eggs, and 77,000 pounds of honey in Ohio, Chamness said. A lot of that domestic product is used in the state.

“It is sourced locally and goes right into our bakeries and to other suppliers that are packaging for us,” Chamness said.

The Quarter Pounder patties are all fresh, never frozen, Chamness said. All the beef that goes in those comes in fresh on refrigerated trucks to the North Baltimore processing facility, where it is ground into fresh hamburger. It is then packaged and shipped to everywhere east of the Mississippi.

“All of the fresh beef is from the United States or is USDA-sourced,” Chamness said. “Some comes in from Canada, but it is on the hoof when it comes in. It comes in live and then is slaughtered so everything goes through FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) inspection before slaughter.”

“If you look at the gross domestic product (GDP) in just the state of Ohio, it is about $2.9 billion,” Chamness said. “If you look at the GDP, the inventory that is purchased from the State of Ohio roughly equates to 34 percent of what is harvested in Ohio.”

McDonald’s also has one of the best tracking records when it comes to securing produce, Chamness said. They watch everything “from soup to nuts,” including the water that is used on agricultural fields.

“There are some places, like in California, where they are trying to mandate wastewater being used on produce farms,” he said. “We will not allow that. There are so many pathogens that can come from wastewater that we do not even want to take the chance of that getting into our system. All of our suppliers are double and triple checked every year to make sure that everything is in lock-step with McDonald’s brand standards.”

However, the relationship between McDonald’s and the farming community goes a lot further than just what the company purchases, Chamness explained.

“I truly believe that, especially in our rural communities, we are a place that farmers come to congregate and discuss what is going on in their communities,” he said. “They come in and talk about their harvest, and how it’s going, and what the crops look like, and the weather. We provide one of those places where farmers get a cup of coffee, free refills, all day, and just hang out and enjoy our restaurants. I think we provide a service in that manner as well. It is a symbiotic circle.”