McDonald’s yanked Quarter Pounders at roughly one-fifth of its US locations after a deadly E.Coli outbreak was linked to the popular burger, the company said Wednesday.
Federal agencies announced Tuesday that one person had died in Colorado and 49 others were sickened in 10 states across the Midwest and West
The nation’s largest fast-food chain said Wednesday that it is confident the culprit of the outbreak were slivered onions atop the Quarter Pounder.
A single, unnamed supplier of the onions is no longer providing vegetables to McDonald’s restaurants, the company added.
It has not severed ties with any beef suppliers, however, officials said they could not rule out that contaminated ground meat was at fault.
Nonetheless, McDonald’s removed Quarter Pounders at about 2,700 locations across 12 states, according to an update on Wednesday from the Centers for Disease Control.
The FDA and CDC alerted McDonald’s about illnesses linked to its food late last week, a spokesman said.
But the first reported case linked to McDonald’s dates back to Sept. 27 — nearly a month ago — leaving some food safety experts scratching their heads about why it took so long to alert the public.
“The information flow is unfolding more slowly than normal,” food safety expert James Marsden told The Post on Wednesday.
“Normally the uptake in reported cases would set off alarms and the [government] would alert the public sooner.”
The CDC had interviewed 18 people with confirmed cases and 12 of them said they had eaten a Quarter Pounder before becoming sick, a McDonald’s spokesman said.
A spokesperson for the CDC told The Post the “Colorado Department of Health notified CDC of an increase in E. coli illnesses in their state on 10/10 and CDC began investigating on 10/15 once laboratory testing confirmed it was a multistate outbreak and not just a local outbreak in Colorado. Investigators are working as quickly as possible to identify a contaminated ingredient.”
Meanwhile, McDonald’s franchisees are bracing for a slump in business — exacerbating a slowdown in sales that has resulted in McDonald’s pushing Value Meals this years.
Its shares plunged more than 5% on Wednesday.
“This will affect us all with people being hesitant to visit,” one franchise operator, who did not want to be identified, told The post.
A McDonald’s spokesman declined to address whether the company’s foot traffic has been impacted by the outbreak.
McDonald’s sells over two million Quarter Pounders a day, the franchisee said, adding that if the outbreaks was “widespread there would be tens of thousands of cases.”
The company is being “very, very, very cautious” in removing Quarter Pounders at its restaurants, the franchisee added .