McDonald’s May Soon Serve Kale—After Promising Never to Serve Kale

The Golden Arches can’t decide whether to troll hipsters or embrace them.


So remember way back in January when McDonald’s promised it would never serve kale?

Well, forget all that, because now the brand may soon do the very thing it vowed not to do just over two months ago. Nation’s Restaurant News has the story:

According to Janney Capital Markets Analyst Mark Kalinowski, the Oak Brook, Ill.-based restaurant chain is planning to add kale as an ingredient in a to-be-named product at some restaurants later this year. 

A spokeswoman for the big burger chain would not confirm or deny the kale reports, saying only that, “As we continue to listen to our customers, we’re always looking at new and different ingredients that they may enjoy.”

A kale flip-flop wouldn’t be that surprising, considering the fact that in the face of McDonald’s increasingly dismal sales, the company is trying to appeal to people who no longer crave giant quantities of processed junk. (And they really don’t, as my colleague Tom Philpott points out here.) To wit: Last week, the company promised to ditch chicken raised on antibiotics. It also recently hired a fact checker to prove it serves real food.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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