Serving Up Superbugs: New Restaurant Chain Antibiotics Scorecard from FACT
By Steve Roach, FACT’s Safe and Healthy Food Program Director
Serving Up Superbugs Scorecard
It’s World Antibiotics Awareness Week 2024 and FACT just released a new report, Serving Up Superbugs, that found that most top restaurant chains in the United States have failed to make progress on commitments to stop the overuse of antibiotics by their meat and poultry suppliers. Panera and McDonald’s have even backslid. The report found that while fifteen of the top 20 restaurant chains have decent policies on their chicken, only Chipotle has implemented good antibiotics policies on other meats. This report is built on the work that FACT and colleague organizations did between 2015 and 2021 when publishing the annual Chain Reaction Scorecards.
Panera dropped from an “A” range grade in earlier antibiotic scorecards to a “D” for significantly weakening its policies around the meat it serves. In previous years, almost all the meats served by Panera were from animals raised without antibiotics or in the case of beef from animals that were not given antibiotics when they were not sick. Sometime after 2022 when most meats served in Panera were still raised under a good antibiotics policy, the company quietly changed its policies without clearly informing their customers. The company states that chicken on sandwiches and salads is still raised without antibiotics, but for the other meats, animals may be given antibiotics when needed. The challenge is that the livestock industry insists that all antibiotic use is needed, so without further clarification on what use is allowed, this does not meet our criterion for a good policy. We first reached out to Panera in April and only recently received a response that did not address concerns about the policy.
McDonald’s backslid on its beef policy since the last antibiotics scorecard we participated in 2021. In 2021, McDonald’s committed to reducing antibiotic use in its beef supply but then later changed to a commitment to “responsible” use not “reducing” use. Responsible use sounds good but when we compared the McDonald’s targets for responsible use they seemed higher than the use in the industry as a whole so do not reflect a change for the better. We have been unable to get McDonald’s to explain the basis for setting those targets.
Antibiotic resistance and the spread of superbugs is getting worse, but public, government, and corporate attention to it has dropped off, putting millions of lives at risk. Food company action can have a positive impact as illustrated by the U.S. chicken industry which has drastically reduced its antibiotics use, but the other meat sectors are resisting change. The backtracking by Panera and McDonald’s on policies and commitments aimed at protecting the health of consumers is incredibly disappointing