McDonald’s is determined to win in chicken and beverages, and now it has the organized infrastructure to support that objective.
The company on Tuesday announced a cross-functional Restaurant Experience Team to move faster in bringing vision and ideas to execution. Jill McDonald, currently president of International Operated Markets, will serve as chief restaurant experience officer, effective May 1.
As part of this move, McDonald’s also set up dedicated category teams focused on beef, chicken, and beverage/desserts. Charlie Newburger, VP of marketing strategy and new business ventures, will head the beverage/desserts team. Leaders of the beef and chicken groups will be announced at a later date, the company said.
“The thinking behind this is, so many of our categories, we’re competing against specialists,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a video. “We’re competing against somebody, like a KFC, for example, who is single-mindedly devoted to winning in chicken. So this category team now allows to actually have that same level of focus on, do we have what we need, the winning strategies to win in chicken, to win in beverages, to win in beef?”
McDonald’s has spent the past several years highlighting its chicken opportunity. The brand will bring back Snack Wraps later this year and launch a new chicken strip offering. It also plans to bring back the Chicken Big Mac as an LTO. McDonald’s believes it can add another point of chicken market share by the end of 2026. Globally, its signature McCrispy sandwich—a $1 billion brand—is sold in over 70 markets and will be available in nearly all markets by the end of this year. During an investor call in July 2024, Kempczinski said chicken sales were on par with beef sales. He noted the burger chain has a “significant opportunity for growth in chicken” and that its category is twice the size of beef globally and growing at a faster rate.
Additionally, McDonald’s believes in the crafted beverage craze so much that it opened the drink-forward CosMc’s to test iterations and judge customer demand. After debuting in Bolingbrook, Illinois, in December 2023, the prototype added six locations in Texas. The plan is to close three larger second-generation restaurants and open two smaller digital-focused formats in the Lone Star State later in 2025. The menu features a variety of energy drinks, refreshing, non-caffeinated beverages, signature brews, and classic brews. The food menu has two sandwiches and multiple snacking options, like hash brown bites and mini doughnuts.
The McDonald’s Restaurant Experience Team will feature voices from supply chain, franchising, development, restaurant design, delivery, and Speedee Labs. The chain will also use the team to serve as the coordinator for in-restaurant technologies and help GMs determine how to efficiently use them to improve unit economics.
The Restaurant Experience Team is a direct descendant of the Customer Experience Team formed in 2021, which was tasked with interconnecting marketing, menu, and digital.
“It’s just going to make us even better. It’s going to allow us to have an even bigger impact for our customers, an even bigger impact for our restaurant crew, for our franchisees,” Kempczinski said. “So I’m excited about it because it just means all the ideas and the vision that we’re coming up with, we’re going to see it in the restaurants even faster.”
McDonald’s U.S. same-store sales fell 1.4 percent in Q4, its worst result since Q2 2020. The poor performance was due to the aftermath of the E. coli outbreak linked to slivered onions on Quarter Pounders. However, the chain expects to be fully recovered from this headwind by the start of Q2 thanks to a combination of value messaging, menu innovation, and digital strength.
