When people accuse McDonald’s of serving food that isn’t nutritionally ideal, they can always point to their salad offerings. See, salads are healthy, and McDonald’s serves salads: therefore, you can eat healthy at McDonald’s, but if consumers choose to eat something else, that’s cool, too. Only the company admitted to investors this weekend that they don’t actually sell a lot of those salads: vegetable-based offerings account for maybe 2-3% of McDonald’s sales in the United States.

While the salads aren’t going anywhere: they’ve been on the menu in some form since 1987. But ad campaigns featuring them aren’t exactly pulling customers in the door. As the company pares down its menu, they’re focusing their ad money on the foods that actually draw customers into a McDonald’s. Those foods: well, pretty much just meat.

“I don’t see salads as being a major growth driver in the near future,” CEO Don Thompson, who is not Ron Johnson, told investors last week. Instead, they plan to refocus advertising efforts on tasty meat dishes and the dollar menu, which accounts for 13-14% of U.S. sales overall. The chain does want to shove more vegetables down our gullets overall, but they’ll be stuffed in a McWrap.

McDonald’s Pushing Meat as Salads Fail to Lure Diners [Bloomberg]

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