McSpicy Paneer

Big in Indian McDonald's. [Link]

Every April McDonald's India executives hold an offsite meeting to chart the brand's future growth plans and consider modifications to its menu. At the 2009 meeting, the team felt that while McDonald'sIndia had an excellent array of vegetarian products, there was no 'premium' - priced above Rs 50 - offering on this platter. It decided there should be one. Abhijit Upadhye, menu management and supply chain head, was given the responsibility of creating it.

That was the starting point of a two-year-long saga that culminated in the launch of 'McSpicy Paneer' in end-March this year, which has proved so popular that most McDonald's Indian outlets keep running out of stock every day.

India is the fast food chain's global vegetarian hub. It is also the only country where McDonald's does not serve its iconic Big Mac, since the burger patty contains beef. Until recently it was also the only country where McDonald's served vegetarian burgers, though lately, the United Arab Emirates has been picking up McDonald's vegetarian products too, primarily to cater to the expatriate Indian population.


Upadhye, who earlier played a key role in adapting McDonald's French fries for the Indian market and launched the breakfast menu in India, began from scratch. Early on, he and his team decided - on the basis of focus group studies - that the premium burger would be paneer based. The problem? No one had ever made a paneer burger before.

McDonald's had introduced paneer in its menu earlier - it used to have McCurry Pan, which comprised crumbled paneer nuggets - but the paneer burger was a different ball game. Consumer feedback showed they wanted a large slice of paneer filling - and easy as it sounds, that presented a host of problems.

As Sudha Shankarnaryanan, General Manager, Product Development and Quality Assurance, points out, there is very little written material on paneer. "Even Indian cookbooks have barely a page on paneer processing," she says. In a company like McDonald's which is devoted to processes, it meant Shankarnaryanan would have to delineate and standardise the process herself. The first task she embarked upon, along with McDonald's India's largest food processor Vista, was to figure out a way to massproduce a spicy paneer 'fillet', that would comprise the filling of the paneer burger
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