The future of McDonald’s is in the driveway

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“Imagine what can happen once we start to know, ‘Oh, Brian is coming to the restaurant’ and what we can do,” Brady says. “We are quite optimistic that the benefits we are seeing now will only continue to accelerate. “

Getting customers through an app is essential not only for McDonald’s but also for all quick service restaurants to some extent. While McDonald’s continues to rely on third parties like Uber Eats for delivery, it plans to offer the ability to place those orders in its own app rather than outsourcing the entire process.

“All of this digital activity is certainly creating a huge amount of data,” says David Portalatin, NPD Group food and beverage analyst. “If I physically walk into a restaurant today, unless I’m really a regular, they don’t know my name, they don’t know what I ordered the last time I was there, or what how often I come. But in a digital world, the algorithm can know all of these things. It can inform better suggestive selling, it can inform the development of new menus, it can inform limited time offers that are truly relevant to specific customer needs. “

The digital push also raises inevitable questions about privacy and its impact on employment. Many of McDonald’s more ambitious plans are too early to know for sure how it will handle the former, although the company notes that it has so far introduced data-hungry mobile features as an opt-in. Suspicious customers may ignore MyMcDonald altogether. As for what Apprente and other efficiencies mean for staffing, Brady presents it as an opportunity to ‘reassign’ workers to other areas, like curbside pickup, that will need help. more support. And NPD’s Portalatin says the shift to curbside collection has actually increased demand for workers in the industry.

“The restaurant industry had a workforce challenge getting started,” Portalatin says. “It’s not like people are banging on their doors trying to work there. Just the opposite. They find it difficult to make people work. “

It’s also important to remember that these changes will be slow, as long as they play out as rendered. “Together, we believe these initiatives could reach over 10,000 restaurants” in the United States and around the world, McDonald’s US Restaurant Manager Mason Smoot said in Monday’s investor update. The company has 36,000 restaurants around the world.

McDonald’s has redesigned its business on several fronts – including the introduction of a McPlant meatless burger – at a time of general uncertainty around the world. It is finally reaping the rewards of major technological investments dating back to last year. And the path of all of these efforts to be successful goes in one direction: through the lane behind the wheel.