Dining with your friends and family at McDonald’s has unraveled countless memoriesAll of us have had or always have a McDo moment – whether it’s a family get-together, grabbing a quick meal in between work, attending a birthday party, a barkada meet up or even a feel-good treat after getting a sad news. 

It’s the food and the warmth of service that makes it different. From day ‘til night, McDonald’s crew and managers make sure to seal every meal with a smile, passing the warm, welcoming vibe to every customer, whether they are dining in, buying meals-to-go, or driving-thru, and even when one opts for the convenience of a McDelivery. The secret behind every McDonald’s authentic service is deeply rooted in its culture that enables them to be the best in their field.

Making meaningful moments the McDonald’s way

Kindness and malasakit (empathy)—these are the values deep-seated in every McDonald’s employee. “Mahalaga ang malasakit sa amin sa mcdo at talagang tinuturo at sinasanay kaming ipamalas ito. Maging dine in, birthday party o kahit anong pagkakataon, makakaasa kayo sa aming ngiti, masaya at safe na serbisyo. Yan ang malasakit namin sa mga customers.,” a crew of the fast food chain shares. 

A commitment to spreading kindness

Over the years, kindness has always been something that McDonald’s is consistently practicing—and encouraging—in all their branches nationwide. However, the value of kindness is not only limited to the four walls of its brick-and-mortar stores but is also reflected in their charity of choice through the Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) of the Philippines, an independent nonprofit organization that is part of the global RMHC network, whose stated mission is to create, find, and support programs that directly improve the health and well-being of children. 

RMHC is the Corporate Social Responsibility arm of McDonald’s Philippines and to date, it has made a difference in the lives of Filipino children through its education programs., 

Their Read-To-Learn is a partnership program with the Department of Education (DepEd) that teaches reading for beginners, mostly first-grade students in public schools. To this day, the program has helped 11,000 partner schools with over 12 million students across the country, while around 30,000 educators were trained. Read to Learn was pilot tested in 14 public schools in Metro Manila and has reached a total of 4,200 first graders. Now, non-readers among Grade 1 public school learners decreased from 40% to 4%.

The Bahay Bulilit Learning Center, on the other hand, a collaboration with the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), has helped facilitate early childhood development among kids, and taught children the basic skills in preparation for formal schooling. Accredited social workers and community volunteers facilitate lessons and group activities for the children to learn while playing.  Also called the “small house full of big dreams”, Bahay Bulilit was launched in 2002, and currently prides itself with 36 active learning centers across the country to cater to various communities.

Cooking up kindness 

At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, McDonald’s cooked up Kindness Kitchen through RMHC. The main goal was to put up a community kitchen that will provide food daily to frontliners from different institutions (including hospitals that have been home to selfless medical practitioners), quarantine facilities with its own volunteers, and to marginalized communities. 

McDonald’s employee-volunteers manned the community kitchen, together with the help of different partners in the public and private sectors. The Kindness Kitchen has initially pledged 50,000 meals for frontliners and community volunteers in Metro Manila, and some parts of Visayas and Mindanao yet it was able to provide an overwhelming 550,000 meals, and it remains steadfast to keep on serving more meals to those in need, thanks to the kindness of its willing volunteers.

In celebration of McDonald’s 40th anniversary, McDonald’s commits another 40,000 meals from the Kindness Kitchen and Kain Tayo, a multi sectoral initiative to provide food for those in need (visit kaintayo.com.ph). All its stores will also be activated next year, for 365 days, to prepare and serve meals to their respective communities.

All these initiatives are visual testimonies of how much McDonald’s values and takes kindness to heart, inside their stores and beyond. Kindness, after all, truly knows no bounds and indeed, goes a long way.

Since we opened our first store in Morayta, Manila forty years ago, our Founder and Chairman, Dr. George T. Yang has always instilled kindness. This means being responsible on how we operate our restaurants, being people-centric starting with our direct hiring policy and valuing our employees’ development and well-being, being obsessed with what the customer needs and always helping the community. No matter how big or small one’s act of kindness is, we can make a difference. As we look forward to the next forty years and beyond of McDonald’s in the Philippines, we remain strongly committed to our people, our customers and the community.,” remarked Kenneth S. Yang, President & CEO of McDonald’s Philippines.

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