McDonald's Canada announced they will be serving certified sustainable beef through their Angus burger line-up.

The announcement was made at the Calgary Stampede's Agriculture and Agri-Food International Reception Wednesday, July 11.

This makes McDonald's the first company in Canada to source sustainable beef from Canadian farms and ranches according to standards from the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB).

Roundtable Chair, Cherie Copithorne-Barnes, ranches west of Calgary and says these standards are practices beef producers already follow.

"But now we're being asked to put it together in a kind of a reportable format." Copithorne-Barnes says. "By creating the demand for the supply, there's going to be some economics that start to roll into this, and producers are really going to start seeing the value in why they have to start thinking about how to formalize their thinking process of how they define what sustainability looks like."

There's 26 indicators to define sustainable beef, Copithorne-Barnes says.

"We always define it as environmentally sound, socially responsible, and economically viable. So what we've done is created a set of indicators, or benchmarks. That information needs to be gathered to define how they (beef producers) do that."

President and CEO of McDonald's Canada, John Bett, says the CRSB is a global first, as no where else in the world is there an organized effort defining what sustainable beef is.

"The good outcome of this is going to be to educate the average consumer and family out there about what sustainability is, and particularly what it means to us in the beef industry."

Bett says, they'll start serving up Canadian sustainable beef later this summer.

McDonald's Canada says, over the next 12-months, more than 20-million Angus burgers will be sourced according to the CRSB standards.

McDonald's Canada sources 100 per cent of the beef for its hamburger patties from Canadian ranches and farms, primarily in Alberta and Saskatchewan.