KFC and All Fried Chicken

answerme asked:


First Challenge
McDonald’s has a lot of competition in China including Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Mom and Pop food stands. When McDonald’s opened its first store in China in 1990, their rival KFC, had already been there for three years. It is estimated that 1.900 KFC stores opened in China, which is more than twice the amount of the Golden Arches (McDonald’s). Besides KFC, McDonald’s has other competitors in China, such as Mom and Pop food stands. These businesses are usually owned by the same family for many generations in a single location and their food is considered traditional, convenient and cheap.
Second Challenge
Furthermore, the sanitation in China is another major issue for McDonald’s. China is still considered a developing country, and its food safety is a nightmarish problem where corruption is rampant and safe food handling is not always practiced. Moreover, because McDonald’s is one of the major sponsors of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, they want to provide customers meals made in a hygienic environment.
Solutions
To encounter this problem, a possible solution would be adding values to its products. First of all, the concept of value adding is to allow a business to sell its products for more than its production costs, thereby earning the business a profit. Since a lot of Chinese is unfamiliar with hamburgers and French fries, McDonald’s can alter its recipes to change the flavor of the products. For instance, in the article McDonald’s has a big appetite in China, it mentioned about seasoned with Szechuan (a province in China) pepper sandwiches. Quality of service plays a role in McDonald’s too. For example, drive-thrus and queue up services. Drive-thrus allow customers to purchase meals without leaving their cars, thus it’s more convenient. Moreover, since a line of people queuing for food orders may find it irritating to wait, Mc Donald’s should hire people to help the customers still waiting to order food, so it can decrease the duration when ordering the food in front of the cashier.
Secondly, food safety is vital to the McDonald’s. Food can transmit disease from person to person. During the production process, no faults will be tolerated. To diminish the possibility of getting errors, McDonald’s can hire specialists to monitor its production process as well as food quality controls. Furthermore, McDonald’s should import their goods from reliable sources so that they can guarantee their customers to have a hygienic meal. For example, their buns, burgers and tomatoes for producing hamburgers should be imported from big factories.

Alfonso