McDonald's is a client of mine via the radio stations I work for. I have frequent contact with the local owner/operators and the agencies that handle their advertising and p.r. for our section of the state of Indiana.

Here's an inside look from Time magazine on what's cooking at the home of Ronald McDonald:

McDonald's Chef: The Most Influential Cook in America?

By John Cloud / Oak Brook

Correction Appended: Feb. 12, 2010

On some level, the very idea of a McDonald's chef sounds preposterous. Burgers, fries, the McRib — is this really the work of a chef? The food at McDonald's tastes partly of nostalgia and partly of marketing; the rest is surely salt.

And yet — have you eaten at a McDonald's lately? In the past five years, the company has started to serve genuinely edible salads, unlike those dry iceberg-and-carrot things it used to offer. The Southwest Salad, which appeared in 2007, comes with a lime wedge and a credible corn salsa. Similarly, the new Angus Third Pounders — a line of relatively expensive and meaty hamburgers that have 66% more beef than a Big Mac and less bread — are just as tasty as the triple-the-price burgers at T.G.I. Friday's.

I'm not the only one who thinks so. After all the bad press in the early '00s — the company has been blamed, with some justification, for the global rise in obesity — McDonald's is enjoying a heady resurgence. Each day, it feeds some 26 million Americans, 2 million more than it did in 2006. In the past five years, the McDonald's Corp. share price has jumped from below $30 to above $60. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)

McDonald's has doubtless benefited from the weak economy — its low-cost, seemingly healthy Snack Wraps (soft tortillas filled with chicken, lettuce and cheese) are perfectly positioned to feed a nation simultaneously worried about money and fat — but the company's boom actually began in 2006, before the recession hit. A major reason was the improvement in its menu. A glowing Feb. 2 Goldman Sachs analyst's report on McDonald's is typical of Wall Street sentiments. The report says McDonald's is "stepping up investment when peers cannot" and cites the "strong new product pipeline" as a key factor.

It turns out there's a chef at the beginning of that pipeline — a cook who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and who once ran the gracious kitchens at the Four Seasons Resort and Club outside Dallas. The Southwest Salad, the Angus burgers, the Snack Wrap — they all emerged from the food laboratory of Daniel Coudreaut, 44, whose business card reads DIRECTOR OF CULINARY INNOVATION, MENU MANAGEMENT but who likes to go by Chef Dan. (See the top 10 bad beverage ideas.)

In a move that could be the New Coke of Coudreaut's career, his kitchen has created the Mac Snack Wrap, or Mac Wrap for short. The Mac Wrap is the first new version of the Big Mac the company has introduced since the iconic burger was launched in the 1960s. The Big Mac remains on the menu — the company isn't stupid — but executives were so fearful of spinning off a variant that internal negotiations and testing took a year. "Don't touch" was the attitude toward the Big Mac when he arrived, says Coudreaut. The fact that the top brass allowed him to remix it is both an expression of the company's faith in him and a signal that McDonald's once again feels strong enough to take risks. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)

The rollout for the Mac Wrap began quietly in December, but by last month, when it became the subject of a major ad campaign, the Mac Wrap was in all 14,000 U.S. McDonald's. For all that, it is a strange, simple little invention. To make a Mac Wrap, you take about half the interior of a Big Mac — a single beef patty, three quick squeezes of special sauce, less lettuce, less cheese, fewer pickles, fewer onions — and wrap the software in a tortilla instead of stacking it on a sesame-seed bun. McDonald's serves the Mac Wrap for only $1.50; it has just 330 calories, 210 fewer than the Big Mac. The wrap offers a familiar taste without the guilt, but that's not to say it's good for you. More than half its calories come from fat, and a single Mac Wrap has 690 mg of sodium — almost as much as in an entire Quarter Pounder (730 mg). One Mac Wrap contains 46% of your recommended daily allowance of salt. (Comment on this story)

Public-health advocates will surely assail the company for creating the wrap, partly because you have to eat two to feel full (at which point you would have been better off ordering one Big Mac). But I wanted to know about the man behind it, this guy who thinks he can tinker with a paragon of Americana as durable as the Big Mac. Coudreaut might call himself Chef Dan, but isn't he just a p.r. stunt, a suit masquerading in chef's whites?

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The Secrets of Celery Root
The youngest of five, Coudreaut grew up in Ossining, N.Y., not far from New York City. From around age 7, he was his mom's helper at mealtimes and kept a written inventory of ingredients in the pantry. At 14, he got a job washing dishes at a diner where the chef-owner let him look over his shoulder at the stoves. For a while, Coudreaut thought he might want to be in show business, and as a kid he got small roles in TV commercials and an off-Broadway play. He also went to business school, but all the while he kept cooking, and at 28, he enrolled at the Culinary Institute.

In 2004, Coudreaut arrived at McDonald's headquarters, a sprawling, bosky campus in Oak Brook, Ill., outside Chicago. His kitchen, which is on the third floor of the main building, is the sort you would see in the back of house at an expense-account restaurant. It features granite countertops (requested by Coudreaut), a giant Wolf range that cost more than most McDonald's employees make in half a year, and a salamander, a device that professional kitchens use to brown food before serving. (See more about McDonald's.)

On the day I visited, Coudreaut was experimenting with some very non-McDonald's ingredients: celery root, broccoli rabe, wild salmon, hazelnuts, candied orange rind. There was a huge pot of veal stock simmering on a back burner of the Wolf. He seemed to want to prove his culinary skills, and he did — he made a delicious lunch — but what does any of this have to do with creating food at a real McDonald's?

The answer is that every great manufacturing company runs a crazy R&D department, a place where mad scientists get to fiddle with toys and produce one or two breakthroughs a year. Coudreaut and his staff of 16 consider approximately 1,800 ideas for new menu items each year, but only a couple — or in an atypical year, as many as five — make it onto the menu. Few stay permanently.

Coudreaut and his team spend most of their time playing with ingredients far more practical than broccoli rabe and celery root. Most days, they work with chicken and apples and beef. Facing the kitchen through a glass wall is a large sign reading IT'S NOT REAL UNTIL IT'S REAL IN THE RESTAURANTS. (See the best business deals of 2009.)

That's a highly corporate way to think about food — celery root is certainly real, so real that it's covered in dirt when you buy it at the supermarket — but McDonald's is, after all, a corporation. Coudreaut may be a chef, but his employer is no restaurant. McDonald's Corp. is largely a holding company, a middleman that works between restaurant owners and food suppliers. It provides franchisees with inexpensive, processed ingredients and — this is where Coudreaut's team and other development people come in — a guarantee that new menu items have been tested and tweaked and retested so they can come out looking and tasting roughly the same in every McDonald's in every part of America. (Teams led by other chefs work on other continents; that's why McDonald's has used rice patties as burger buns in Hong Kong and Taiwan and now offers a whole-shrimp sandwich on a steamed bun in Japan.)

And anyway, there is literally not enough celery root grown in the world for it to survive on the menu at McDonald's — although the company could change that, since its menu decisions quickly become global agricultural concerns. Not long after he arrived at McDonald's in 2004, Coudreaut added to the menu an Asian salad that included edamame. The Soyfoods Council, a trade group, immediately got calls from consumers across the nation looking to buy edamame at their grocery stores. "Now you can find it in supermarkets all over," says the council's executive director, Linda Funk, who has even seen the immature soybean pods sold near her small hometown of Janesville, Wis.

Nothing gets on the menu at McDonald's without the approval of hundreds of people: marketers, franchise representatives, engineers who specialize in food hold times, operations managers who know precisely how far refrigerated trucks can drive before food rots and money people who have read reams of market research that has relentlessly focus-grouped every ingredient combination that could be part of a Snack Wrap.

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The franchisees are a particularly important constituency, since they pay for the equipment to produce any new menu item. They often have ideas for Coudreaut's team to appraise — the Angus burgers were co-developed with a group of California franchisees — and they often push back against odd-sounding creations like one of Coudreaut's failures, a breakfast Snack Wrap made with a crepe that held vanilla cream cheese and fruit. ("Why it didn't work is because we served it cold," Coudreaut says. "We serve hot food. Even our salads, we serve warm chicken on top.") The testing process is painstaking: it took two years for the Angus Third Pounders, the company's first new burger in eight years, to get on the menu.

When I visited his kitchen, Coudreaut made an exquisite endive and poached-pear salad with dried cherries and mustard-seed dressing. Say he wanted to put that salad on the menu. Among his first steps would be to go to the produce experts at McDonald's and ask about endive. He imagined the answer he would get: "Well, Dan, you're gonna have to get somebody to grow it. And that's not hard to do, but it's gonna take three years." (See 10 myths about dieting.)

So then Coudreaut might consider mixing the endive with more commercially available lettuces, a step that would reduce the lead time. What about the mustard-seed dressing? You could do that even faster, plus it's a "great flavor combination with the cherries," he said. Except there's a problem with cherries: you can never guarantee that all the pits are out. Imagine the lawsuit from the guy who breaks a tooth on a pit. So you end up with only the pears. They are widely available and have a great shelf life. Coudreaut poached the pears he served to me in gewürztraminer. McDonald's could never do that for its outlets, but what if you softened pear slices in a poaching liquid other than wine — a step that would both enhance flavor and extend hold time? "Why couldn't we do a signature poached pear?" Coudreaut asked, getting very excited.

At just this point in our conversation, the McDonald's p.r. executive who was with us — an elegant British woman named Danya Proud — coughed rather loudly. Coudreaut trailed off. R&D is secret at every company. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

Building a Better Big Mac
Of course, this is still McDonald's, which means Coudreaut's food must eventually be so simple that a high school dropout can make it. And so, culinarily speaking, McDonald's moves in baby steps. Before Coudreaut, the company had never asked its cooks to brush a glaze onto a chicken breast before setting it on a salad. Now glazing the chicken is standard, which is one reason the salads taste so much better.

Coudreaut's quest to improve on time-honored formulas is what led him to the Mac Wrap, a product that will be a good experiment in whether the eating habits of McDonald's customers can be nudged in new directions. Coudreaut's immediate boss, vice president of menu management Wade Thoma, had to push hard inside the Oak Brook headquarters to sell the idea that the Mac Wrap is, in Coudreaut's words, "how people are eating today — on the go, in smaller portion sizes." Smaller doesn't necessarily mean healthier, though. McDonald's is acutely aware of the criticisms about the food it has sold for the past half-century, but in the end, it also knows that very few McDonald's customers have read Fast Food Nation, a scathing indictment of the industry, or seen the 2003 documentary Super Size Me, in which a filmmaker ate only McDonald's for a month and — shockingly — got fat. Instead, McDonald's has learned to focus on balance: you add a healthy Southwest Salad, and then you add a rich Angus burger. Also, you don't mess with the fries. Coudreaut could never mess with the fries.

Still, it's nice to know McDonald's employs a dreamer. In addition to that endive salad, Coudreaut sautéed a very simple wild-salmon fillet for me — just salmon seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked in olive oil. Four ingredients. I asked why four ingredients couldn't work at McDonald's. Coudreaut thought for a moment and gave a half nod, half shrug. "Maybe five years from now," he said.

The original version of this article misstated that McDonald's has used rice patties as burger buns in China. It was in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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