Smarter Kitchens For McDonald’s

McDonald’s Corporation announced last week that it has joined LONMARK International as a Sponsor Member. The international restaurant company was motivated to join LONMARK to draw on the resources of that association in order to create and manage interoperability standards for its networked kitchen equipment and building automation systems. Interoperability standards help to ensure that the kitchen and building equipment can communicate with each other on a restaurant network.

LONMARK is a non-profit international association recognized for the certification, education, and promotion of interoperability standards for control networking. In joining the association’s Board of Directors, McDonald’s joins other Sponsor members — Distech Controls Inc.; Echelon Corporation; Honeywell International, Inc.; Philips Lighting B.V.; Siemens Building Technologies; Schneider Electric; and Trane.

“LONMARK International has long history of supporting multi-vendor interoperability standards, making it the ideal organization to administer this program for us,” said Glenn Schackmuth, director worldwide equipment systems with McDonald’s Corporation.

“By working with LONMARK we will be able to leverage an international standard and allow for open access to the standards for others to adopt in their kitchen and building equipment networking efforts,” continued Schackmuth. “The restaurant industry has been exploring the benefits of networking kitchen equipment for many years. The barrier to large-scale adoption has largely been justifying the cost for the networking technology. The open access should help to allow for a broader adoption of the standards and technology, thereby reducing the cost of equipment networking for McDonald’s and the industry.”

McDonald’s has been working with numerous technology, kitchen, and building equipment suppliers on its Smart Restaurant initiative since 2007. The McDonald’s Smart Restaurant equipment communicates and shares information utilizing a common network infrastructure, allowing for the development of applications that will help to improve operational and energy efficiency in its restaurants worldwide.