How Brilliant Is McDonald's Marketing? Just Ask Chef Dan

(MoneyWatch)  Let's say you're a restaurant chain whose critics relentlessly attack you for selling low quality, crappy food that will make you fat and unhealthy. What do you do?

If you're McDonald's, you hire a chef with gourmet training and an upper-crust name, and you give him a fancy title. Oh, and you invite reporters back into his test kitchen to see all the exotic fine dining concoctions he's whipping up.

Introducing Chef Dan, McDonald's director of culinary innovation. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, one of the nation's premier cooking schools, Dan Coudreaut is not actually French, but he knows how to make a mean crème brûlée. Before coming to McDonald's four years ago, Coudreaut worked at a Four Seasons restaurant and a New York City French bistro.

As articles in the Chicago Tribune and Business Week have pointed out, Chef Dan spends his days making pineapple salsa and red curry eggplant. "Good food is good food, no matter if you're in a white-table-cloth restaurant or a quick-serve restaurant," said the 44-year old.

And here you were thinking McDonald's was a place to get cheap burgers and fries! If you didn't know any better, you might think that McDonald's restaurants had actual kitchens with people mixing and chopping, instead of assembly lines operated by entry level workers making $8 an hour.

But it should be said that all of Chef Dan's gourmet tinkering is not only great marketing, but it has helped McDonald's maintain an impressive record of fresh and cutting edge menu items -- at least for fast food standards, that is. In recent years, McDonald's has launched the Fruit and Walnut Salad, the Chicken Snack Wrap, the Angus burger (with mushrooms!) and the Southwest Salad. Coudreaut also developed the Asian Salad, which is no longer on the menu but undoubtedly introduced millions of Americans to edamame.

The fact that a guy who likes to make mirin-glazed ahi tuna with a buckwheat noodle cake is sitting at meetings where executives talk about what kinds of new foods and ingredients McDonald's won't help a bit with critics like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Morgan Spurlock. That's not what the company's going for. All they want to do is persuade the average customer that McDonald's food is more wholesome and better for them than they thought.

Manipulated McDonald's image via Flickr user Looking Glass, CC 2.0