McDonald’s Next: Specialists Crack the Burger Giant’s Moat

McDonald’s laid out the next phase of its turnaround at its Worldwide convention in Las Vegas on Monday, a plan it calls McDonald’s Next that reworks the menu, in-store technology, restaurant design and customer service all at once. The company says it wants to stop asking diners to pick between speed and quality, or value and taste, and it is pointing the effort straight at a fast-growing crop of chicken and beverage chains chipping away at its traffic.

That framing matters, because the overhaul reads less like a victory lap and more like a defense. A burger empire that long won on price and convenience is now retooling its kitchens around chicken, retrying the drive-thru technology it scrapped two years ago, and asking franchisees to pay for remodels, all because the specialists have changed what American diners expect from a quick meal.

The Specialists Forcing McDonald’s Hand

Chris Kempczinski, McDonald’s chief executive, named the threat directly in a system message to franchisees and staff. His argument was that the chain can no longer let customers trade one virtue for another.

They want what Ray called the total of everything. They won’t trade one for another because they don’t have to. In a world where every restaurant is a swipe away, there is no such thing as second place.

The line, a nod to founder Ray Kroc, captures the pressure Kempczinski sees. “Traditional competitors are upgrading their menus, and a new wave of specialists are emerging and redefining taste and quality across chicken, beef and beverages,” he wrote. The numbers behind that warning are blunt. McDonald’s grew US comparable sales 2.1% across 2025, according to McDonald’s full-year 2025 results, while the upstarts it now studies posted growth a system this size cannot match in percentage terms.

7 Brew Drive Thru Coffee was the fastest-growing US chain of the year. Dave’s Hot Chicken, a Nashville-style tender shop that began as a parking-lot pop-up, ranked second with a 51% jump in sales and pushed past 300 locations. None of them comes close to McDonald’s scale, but each owns a single category the Golden Arches long treated as a side order.

Chicken Becomes the Main Battleground

The clearest tell of where McDonald’s sees the fight is inside its kitchens. The company has been testing hand-breaded chicken strips in Chicago and a handful of other markets, a clear step up from its current McCrispy line, and executives appear set on expanding the higher-quality product into tenders and sandwiches.

• Hand-breaded strips in test in Chicago and select markets, coated in-store rather than arriving pre-breaded.
• Bigger tenders and bone-in wings under evaluation, products McDonald’s already sells in some overseas markets.
• A higher-end chicken sandwich line in development to sit above the existing McCrispy.

Confidence comes partly from abroad. Markets such as Malaysia already serve hand-breaded chicken at scale, which executives say proves the operation can hold up under heavy volume. The harder question is whether roughly 13,500 US restaurants can hand-bread chicken without wrecking the speed that built the brand, a tension food-quality analysts have already flagged.

A Second Run at Drive-Thru AI

The technology pillar is where McDonald’s is taking its biggest reputational risk. The company is building a restaurant operating system called ArchIQ and testing voice-activated artificial intelligence (AI, software that takes and processes spoken orders) at five drive-thrus in partnership with Google. The assistant behind the speaker has a nickname: Archy.

What Archy Is Built to Do

The pitch is efficiency more than novelty. ArchIQ is meant to run the back of the house, trimming unnecessary steps inside the kitchen and freeing crew for other tasks, while Archy handles the drive-thru order. McDonald’s expects real progress on the system through 2026, with a goal of finishing the rollout across the chain by 2027.

If it works, the payoff is faster, more accurate ordering at the channel that drives most of McDonald’s US business. The drive-thru is where the chain lives or dies on throughput, so even small gains in order speed compound across millions of cars a day.

Why the Last Attempt Collapsed

McDonald’s has been here before, and it did not end well. Between 2021 and mid-2024 it ran an automated order-taking (AOT, voice software that takes drive-thru orders without a human) pilot built with IBM across more than 100 US drive-thrus.

The system struggled with accents, background noise and overlapping voices, and the misfires went viral. TikTok clips showed it adding nine sweet teas to a single order and slipping bacon onto an ice cream cone. McDonald’s pulled the technology from all restaurants by late July 2024 and said it would look for new voice-AI partners. Google is that partner, and Archy is the second swing.

New Drinks, a Bigger Burger, and the Influencer Pivot

The menu work goes well beyond chicken. McDonald’s has been overhauling its beverage program, rolling out its first lineup of Refreshers and crafted sodas in flavors such as Strawberry Watermelon and Mango Pineapple, with energy drinks slated for later in the year after a Red Bull collaboration tested across more than 500 restaurants. On the beef side, the half-pound Big Arch arrived as a limited-time offering (LTO, a menu item sold for a set window) after success in markets such as the United Kingdom; you can see the Big Arch meal details on the company’s site.

Quality perception is part of the bet. A recent taste test of fast-food double cheeseburgers put the biggest chains at the bottom, the kind of result McDonald’s Next is meant to reverse with thicker patties and fresher drinks.

The other half of the consumer pillar is attention. McDonald’s plans to lean harder into influencer marketing to keep the brand visible on social media, and it invited a roster of creators to the Las Vegas convention. The goal is to give customers more ways to interact with the brand at a moment when the specialists are winning the feed as much as the food court.

Who Pays for the Remodels

None of this lands for free. McDonald’s debuted a new restaurant prototype at the convention and is offering the redesign to franchisees who already have a remodel coming up, which means much of the visible cost of McDonald’s Next will sit on operators’ books rather than the corporate balance sheet.

The hospitality pillar leans on those same operators. McDonald’s is reworking how it trains crew, betting that warmer service inside the restaurant converts into repeat visits, while the new technology is supposed to hand workers back the time to deliver it. “As more of the customer journey becomes automated, there are fewer opportunities for guests to connect with crew,” Kempczinski said, arguing that the bar for the interactions that remain only rises.

The Squeeze Behind the Strategy

The reset is happening because the math at the bottom of the menu has turned against McDonald’s. Traffic from lower-income diners has fallen by close to double digits for nearly two years, and the average price of a menu item climbed about 40% between 2019 and 2024, eroding the value reputation that has always been the chain’s foundation.

The recovery has been uneven. US comparable sales fell 3.6% in the first quarter of 2025 before swinging to a 3.6% gain by the third, helped by loyalty and value pushes. Broader food inflation that has pushed grocery and produce prices higher keeps pressure on the same low- and middle-income households McDonald’s depends on.

• $139.4 billion in global systemwide sales in 2025, up 7%
• 2.1% US comparable sales growth for the full year
• 210 million 90-day active loyalty users at year-end
• 40% rise in the average menu-item price from 2019 to 2024

The figures come from the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings filing. If the hand-breaded chicken and Archy scale without slowing the line, McDonald’s Next gives the chain a credible answer to the specialists and a reason for value-stretched diners to come back. If the chicken bogs down the kitchen or the AI stumbles the way IBM’s did, McDonald’s will have spent franchise capital and brand goodwill on a fight it still has not won.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is McDonald’s Next?

McDonald’s Next is the business strategy McDonald’s unveiled at its Worldwide convention in Las Vegas in June 2026. It rests on four pillars, menu, the consumer, the restaurant and hospitality, and is designed to make the chain more competitive with specialist chicken, beef and beverage chains.

What is Archy, McDonald’s drive-thru AI?

Archy is the nickname for McDonald’s new voice-activated drive-thru assistant, built with Google and running on an in-store operating system called ArchIQ. It is being tested at five locations, after the company scrapped an earlier IBM-built system in July 2024 following viral ordering errors.

Is McDonald’s adding hand-breaded chicken nationwide?

Not yet. McDonald’s is testing hand-breaded chicken strips in Chicago and select markets and is evaluating larger tenders and bone-in wings. Executives point to markets like Malaysia, where hand-breaded chicken already sells at scale, as evidence the product can work in more US restaurants.

When do McDonald’s new Refreshers and energy drinks launch?

McDonald’s rolled out three Refreshers and three crafted sodas in flavors including Strawberry Watermelon and Mango Pineapple in early May, and plans to add energy drinks later in the year after testing a Red Bull collaboration across more than 500 US restaurants.