The latest gastronomic sensation in France is the burger - and not just any beef patty in a bun. Only the McDo will do. You can ignore anti-globalisation protests, French cultural snobbery and antipathy over Iraq, the monkeys have not merely surrendered but are prostrating themselves at the Golden Arch.

McDonald's has conquered the last bastion of global resistance to American cuisine and it has the turnover and profits to prove it. In 2007, its French revenues increased by 11 per cent to €3 billion (£2.3 billion), almost 10 per cent on a like-for-like basis.

Even more astonishing, France is leading the field for McDonald's in Europe; its profitability is ahead of Britain and showing a clean pair of heels to the stagnating American market. The double-digit sales growth continued in the first quarter and there is evidence that the Big Mac is outpacing rivals in the French fast-food arena.

A good deal of the credit goes to local management and to Jean-Pierre Petit, the McDo boss from Marseilles who put French style into the operation, including burgers with Reblochon cheese.

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He shed the loud yellow plastic in favour of something more subtle - the French company website invites you to tour a model McDo eatery that has more the look of a restaurant in Tokyo, with leather, steel and pastel shades - than a diner in Baltimore.

Better upholstery (and cheese) doesn't tell the whole story, nor even a Gallic tendency for contrarian behaviour. The world, too, is changing. If the French are looking for better value at the cheap end of the food market than is provided by the typical menu prix fixe, that trend is soon to be replicated worldwide.

Household budgets are tighter due to rising fuel and grocery bills and that environment works in favour of companies such as McDonald's, which operate on enormous economies of scale and can offer a keenly priced meal. These rising price trends are creating dramas further up the food chain, where suppliers of beef and poultry are being snatched and grabbed in a massive corporate upheaval.

Meatpacking used to be the dullest business, an unpleasant trade in blood and offal with very slim margins. Caught between the volatile pricing of pork bellies on the one hand and the ruthless pressure of the supermarkets on the other, the abattoirs and sausage factories looked like little more than tolling operations, adding small value.

Their role has not changed but their scale is about to increase hugely. The food packing and processing industry is on the march in search of pricing power and market share. This unsexy business sector is about to have its day and a few companies are aggressively pushing for advantage.

In the space of a single week in June, two of Britain's leading meatpackers fell into foreign ownership. Grampian Country Foods, of Scotland, was bought by Vion, a Dutch food giant, while Moy Park, the Northern Irish poultry processor, was snapped up by Marfrig, of Brazil, for £348 million.

The latter deal is a signal of the growing might of Brazil in agricultural produce and it speaks volumes of its aggressive stance in the world trade talks in Geneva. Brazil is a big exporter of beef and poultry; it claims 40 per cent of the global chicken trade and it would like to export more beef into Europe but is frustrated by European Union restrictions.

The deal provoked a protest from the National Farmers' Union in Britain, which gave warning that the purchase of Moy Park should not become a “Trojan horse” for the import of Latin American animal carcases into Europe.

Meanwhile, similar turmoil has beset the US meat sector. Another Brazilian meatpacker, JBS, bought Swift, a big American beef processor, last year for $1.4 billion.

This year the Brazilians returned with a proposal to buy National Beef Packing and the beef unit of Smithfield, two big rivals, provoking protests from American cattle ranchers and congressional demands for an anti-trust investigation.

The American cattle ranchers should blame US arable farmers rather than Brazilians. The margins of meatpackers have been badly squeezed in recent years because of high animal feed costs.

The biofuel industry has been competing for supplies of grain, pushing up the cost of soybean and corn. That, in turn, has hurt the meat industry, causing share prices to crumble and creating opportunities for the giants of Brazil to grab market share.

All that may be about to change because America is now expecting a good corn harvest. The price signal has been heard and more grain has been planted, which should bring down feed costs, but the seeds have been sown for meat price increases.

The food industry is having its day, but the firms that enjoy the sunshine will not be the ones that suffered the rain. In their place will be new names from overseas, with more power and pricing muscle.

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