Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 13
1
2 Q. At the meetings, what was the reaction of both McDonald's
3 and the other companies?
4 A. I can only tell you in general for two reasons.
5 (1) We agreed to keep the content of the meetings, as
6 I recall, confidential, and (2) my memory has done that
7 for me over the past six years by pretty much
8 agglutinating the comments of the various companies. I do
9 not have, in other words, specific memory of what
10 McDonald's told us versus what Burger King or Kentucky
11 Fried Chicken told us in any specific respect at that
12 series of meetings.
13
14 We were gathering information from the companies as to
15 their concerns because we wanted to address all of them at
16 once. We wanted to treat them all equally. It did not
17 really matter whether McDonald's or Jack-in-the-Box told
18 us a particular concern. So, in general, we made known to
19 them our concerns in more detail than the May 6, 1986
20 letter gives, but along those same lines.
21
22 We also, as I recall, pretty much admitted to them that
23 while we felt we had an absolute lay-down in terms of
24 being able to win any law suit we brought against them on
25 ingredient labelling on the packaging, we recognised that
26 it was more problematic whether or not we would win a
27 nutrition law suit to get nutrition across the menu
28 disclosed to the consumers.
29
30 They, generally speaking, indicated a willingness to make
31 this information available. Some, such as McDonald's, did
32 have much of the information already, although sequestered
33 it at company headquarters or some place else in a means,
34 a method, that was not available to consumers, and,
35 therefore, would find the mechanics of making the
36 information fairly easy. Some companies had not gone in
37 that direction and had some concerns about how they would
38 do it, what it would cost them to find out this nutrition
39 and ingredient information, or rather just nutrition.
40 I suspect they all knew the ingredients; they knew what
41 went into the products. But the nutritional analysis is a
42 matter that requires laboratory analysis.
43
44 Some companies were concerned about that, but to a
45 company, they were all concerned about the method of
46 making disclosure. They did not want to make the
47 disclosure of ingredient nutrition information on their
48 packaging. The ostensible reason given to us for that
49 disinclination was the cost of modifying the packaging.
50 For instance, some companies would use one wrapper for a
51 variety of products, and the exact type of product would
52 depend on how they folded the final label of the
53 products. So they folded one corner on top, it would say
54 "hamburger", the other corner would say "cheeseburger" if
55 they folded it over.
56
57 There was a great deal of concern about the cost or the
58 unfeasibility of making disclosures on the packaging
59 itself. We tended to believe that the true reason for
60 that objection was a disinclination to tell people the
