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McDonald's USA "Create your taste"

 In a brand-new McDonald’s outlet near its headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, customers do not have to queue at the counter. They can go to a touch screen and build their own burger by choosing a bun, toppings and sauces from a list of more than 20 “premium” ingredients, including grilled mushrooms, guacamole and caramelised onions. Then they sit down, waiting an average of seven minutes until a server brings their burgers to their table.

McDonald’s  is planning to roll out its “Create Your Taste” burgers in up to 2,000 restaurants—it is not saying where—by late 2015. It is also trying to engage with customers on social media and is working on a smartphone app, as well as testing mobile-payment systems such as Apple Pay, Softcard and Google Wallet.

All this is part of the “Experience of the Future”, a plan to revive the popularity of McDonald’s, especially among younger consumers. “We are taking decisive action to change fundamentally the way we approach our business,” says Heidi Barker, a spokeswoman.

In 2014 Don Thompson, the firm’s relatively new boss, had to fight fires around the world, some of them beyond his control. Sales in China fell sharply after a local meat supplier was found guilty of using expired and contaminated chicken and beef. Some Russian outlets were temporarily closed by food inspectors, apparently in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine. And a strike at some American ports left Japanese McDonald’s outlets short of American-grown potatoes, forcing them to ration their portions of fries.

However, the biggest problem has been in America—by far McDonald’s largest market, where it has 14,200 of its 35,000 mostly franchised restaurants. In November its American sales were down 4.6% basically due to competition from Burger King, Subway and Starbucks, and from the growing popularity of more upmarket “fast casual” outlets.

In response, McDonald’s has expanded its menu. Its American menu now has almost 200 items.  

“McDonald’s stands for value, consistency and convenience,” says Darren Tristano at Technomic, a restaurant-industry consultant, and it needs to stay true to this. Most diners want a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder at a good price, served quickly.

McDonald’s says it has got the message and is experimenting in some parts of America with a simpler menu: one type of Quarter Pounder with cheese rather than four; one Snack Wrap rather than three; and so on. However, this seems to run contrary to the build-your-burger strategy it is trying elsewhere, which expands the number of choices.

Some analysts think that McDonald’s should stop trying to replicate all its rivals’ offerings. It should go back to basics and offer a limited range of dishes at low prices, served freshly and quickly.

To make matters worse, McDonald’s isn’t cool any more, especially among youngsters.  It is hard to imagine the new McDonald’s initiatives getting the reaction Shake Shack got when it opened its first outlet in downtown Chicago in November: for the first two weeks it had long queues of people waiting outside in the freezing cold.

edited from The Economist

 

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 Daniele Quercia works in the area of social media at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona.
Before that, he was a Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.
 He is interested in the relationship between online and offline worlds and his work has been focusing in the areas of data mining, computational social science, and urban informatics. His research has been published in leading venues including ICSE, Ubicomp, ICDM, CSCW, RecSys, WSDM, and WWW, received honorable mentions from AAAI ICWSM, and has been featured on La Repubblica, The Independent, New Scientist, Le Monde, and BBC.
 He was Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked on social networks in a city context, and his PhD thesis at UC London was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.
During his PhD, he was a Microsoft Research PhD Scholar and MBA Technology Fellow of London Business School, and he also interned at the National Research Council in Barcelona and at National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.
 He studied at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and University of Illinois (USA).


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