McDonald’s (MCD) is taking a new approach to its menu, and it’s all about you.
“Customers want to personalize their meals with locally relevant ingredients,” McDonald’s Chief Executive Don Thompson said on Tuesday, after the fast-food giant again posted disappointing earnings. Starting in January, he said, McDonald’s will simplify the core menu to highlight popular items, cut back on items that don’t sell well, and begin to allow regional groups of franchisees to offer more localized versions of burgers, beverages, and chicken and breakfast items.
In one indication of this new regionalism, McDonald’s confirmed last week that the McRib rollout would not be nationwide since pork is more popular in some regions than others. Other regional offerings so far include chorizo burritos (Texas, Hawaii, and the Midwest), mozzarella sticks (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), and the cheddar bacon onion burger (previously in the New York area).
Courtesy McDonald's
The idea is for franchisees to select items from McDonald’s vast global innovation pipeline and then tweak them to “address the unique needs, taste, and diversity of the local customers,” Thompson said. This has been going on for some time—take the taro pie in Hawaii, for instance—but it will be a greater part of the chain’s strategy moving forward.
Beyond localizing menus, McDonald’s also plans to gradually allow customers to customize items as part of a program it calls “Create Your Taste.” The restaurant is testing build-your-own burgers at a few locations in California and in overseas markets like Australia, with three more markets to be added next year.
If today’s customers who have been turning away from McDonald’s clearly want more “choices on how they order, choices in what they order, and how they’re served,” as Thompson said on Tuesday, the challenge for the world’s biggest hamburger chain is also clear. McDonald’s has been engineered to pump out lots of uniform items quickly, and it will now need to figure out how to pump out lots of customized food just as quickly.
McDonald’s was already dealing with operational issues that have slowed service, before even starting to reconfigure its kitchens to handle custom ordering and regional menu variations. But so far, Thompson said, such changes are working well at test restaurants. “We know that from an operational perspective we’re able and capable of delivering this experience in the restaurant,” he said.
Embracing difference can be read as an acknowledgement by McDonald’s that it simply hasn’t kept up with consumer expectations. Sales trends suggest McDonald’s own efforts to develop new items people crave haven’t been going so well (remember Mighty Wings?). So releasing control of the menu could allow local leaders to figure out what works best while giving customers more freedom to just order what they want.
