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McDonald's has made billions from standardizing operations as much as possible across the world.

> If they allowed a greater quantity of icons that work better for each region, why wouldn't this simply be better?

Economies of scale, consistent printed materials.

Rather than have 109 variants of the icons printed on 109 variants of the packaging you standardize as much of the package as you can, allows you to print larger volumes and distribute them more easily.

Saves money in the long run. Having gone through the process of ordering package prints I can say for sure that single run prints of packaging at scale is much cheaper than 100 variants. When you're operating at the level of McDonalds everything, no matter how minuscule, becomes something to be optimized.

Not to mention the fact that there are regulations and standards that prescribe how this information needs to be displayed in many places. For example, this wouldn't meet the standards for nutritional information in Australia (we have a standardidised table form).