Chris Kempczinski’s new value menu for McDonald’s
Semafor · Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson ·
Chris Kempczinski is counting on risk-taking, accountability, and chicken to revive McDonald’s’ US growth.
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An 11-item menu board from the 1950s still hangs in McDonald’s Chicago headquarters, recalling the era when Ray Kroc struck his franchise agreement with the McDonald brothers and began building the world’s best known fast-food chain. The 10-cent root beers are long gone, but Chris Kempczinski, who marked his seventh anniversary as CEO this week, is having to pay new attention to its value proposition.
The business is facing a “challenging” US consumer environment, he told investors this week, with comparable sales falling 0.2% in the three months to September. Kempczinski’s assurance that the company had started to turn things around in the last month of the quarter helped revive a stock that had fallen a jarring 32% between February and October. But to reverse the drop in customer visits, he has had to put more marketing dollars behind potentially slimmer-margin deals, like a $2 breakfast sandwich with free fries for loyalty program members.