McDonald's Joins Networking Standards Body, Sets its Sights on Kitchen Tech Integration

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

McDonald's is turning to LONMARK International to create and manage interoperability standards for 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 International has a long history of supporting multi-vendor interoperability standards, making it the ideal organization to administer this program for us," says 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. 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," continues Schackmuth.

McDonald's has been working with numerous technology, kitchen and building equipment suppliers on its Smart Restaurant initiative for the past several years. 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.

LONMARK International is an international, non-profit corporation supporting the testing and certification of products, people and companies supporting the ISO/IEC 14908-1 standard. Its nearly 400 members manufacture, distribute, develop, install or use systems based on this standard.