Last week McDonald's Canada's Senior Manager of sustainability spoke at the University of Manitoba about their perspective on sustainable food systems.

While Jeffrey Fitzpatrick-Stilwell discussed their Canadian pilot project to source sustainable beef, and he mentioned their recent transition to 100 per cent cage free Canadian eggs, one topic missing from the conversation was pork.

McDonald's relies on Canadian producers for beef and eggs, but the bacon on their burgers actually comes from American hogs as Fitzpatrick-Stilwell explains.

"And that is largely driven by economics where we get significant cost savings when we purchase in bulk with McDonald's US. Certainly we are always investigating other opportunities, so I think were constantly looking at Canada to see if there is an opportunity to source pork from Canada at some point in the future."

Fitzpatrick-Stilwell says as of 2016, McDonald's want to set a global commitment of purchasing beef from verified sustainable sources, with Canada being the testing grounds for the project.

"So we need to understand what is a realistic level? What is a realistic percentage or volume? that we will be able to source from that time frame. So the verified sustainable beef pilot is a global pilot that we are really proud is happening in Canada and it's help to inform that internally for us but then also it is helping to inform the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef's work,as they work on a much longer term, broader process for all of Canadian production."