A pilot project with McDonald’s which tested the principles and criteria of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef  is being deemed a success.

Jeffery Fitzpatrick Stillwell says the project results were released last week for McDonald’s Sustainable Beef Pilot Project.

"We have now proved in Canada that you can track cattle right from birth straight through to burger and that is something that hadn't been done before so we were really proud that we were able to use this pilot to be able to prove that. Information sharing up and down the whole value chain is a real critical element that the industry is going to need to take on even more strongly than they have in the past. We are here to help to make sure we are supportive of that and continue to be supportive of that," he said.

Stillwell says producers volunteered to be part of the pilot project that tested out the  Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef’s principles and criteria.

"We were just delighted with the response that we had with the Canadian Beef Industry, right from cow/calf producers all the way to our processors with Cargill and JBS. We had close to 200 people volunteer to be part of it so it was just an incredibly positive response," he said.

The project demonstrated that sustainable practices and outcomes can  be verified through the entire supply chain, while cattle from verified sustainable beef operations can also be tracked through these operations.

Last year, McDonald’s sourced 65 million pounds of beef from Canadian beef producers.

The McDonald’s project tracked the journey of nearly 9000 head of Canadian cattle or the equivalent of 2.4 million beef patties raised  on or handled through verified sustainable operations.