On the heels of Frito-Lay’s campaign focused on the sources of its products, McDonald’s is going to launch a new promotion in the USA, revolving around the company’s meat and vegetable suppliers, to showcase real people, who help make the fast food chain’s offerings organic. The new push, which includes TV, print and digital, additional paid and earned media, is slated for January 2, and, as AdAge reports, it will be “running sporadically” through the end of 2012.

“We thought putting a face on the quality of the food story would be a unique way to approach this,» said U.S. Chief Marketing Officer at McDonald’s Neil Golden. «We acknowledge that there are questions about where our food comes from. I believe we’ve got an opportunity to accentuate that part of our story.» The campaign will include four suppliers—Frank Martinez and Jenn Bunger (potatoes), Dirk Giannini (lettuce) and Steve Fogelsong at Black Gold Ranch (beef).

The previous years showed that consumers prefer to know where their products come from, and that’s why such promotions help establish stronger connection between the chain and consumers. Such campaigns are developed primarily to highlight the quality of the products rather than put a supplier into the picture—for McDonald’s, it’s not the first promotion of this kind since in 2008 it launched the ‘What we’re made of’ campaign and a bunch of smaller projects. On the company’s official website, one can find a page dedicated to transparency of how and from what meals on McDonald’s menu are cooked.

Trying to be as open to its consumers as possible, McDonald’s doesn’t miss an opportunity to poke fun at one of its major rivals, Burger King. Recently, the fast food giant released a German ad by Tribal DDB and German shop Heye & Partners, in which a little kid puts fries from McDonalds behind a Burger King bag because otherwise children around him steal the food from him, leaving the boy hungry. Despite the fact that McDonald’s Germany decided not to air the ad on TV, responding to Burger King’s complaint that the spot is “degrading,” says AdAge. Still, the ad is on YouTube and has generated millions of views.