McDonald's Investor Day 2026

Good morning, and welcome to McDonald's 2026 Investor Day. Thank you to everyone for joining us, whether here at our headquarters in Chicago or via our live stream. Just a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. As many of you are aware, we issued a press release this morning summarizing highlights from today's presentation. We will post key slides from the presentation on our website. Also, please note that the forward-looking statements on our press release and 8-K filing also apply to our comments in the presentation today. Those documents will be available on our website, as will reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures in today's presentation, along with their corresponding GAAP measures. This morning we will take you through our strategy to drive growth and productivity. We will then close out our webcast with a Q&A session. With that, we are ready to begin.

Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the global senior leadership team, welcome to McDonald's Investor Day. We have got an exciting day planned. I also hope you are hungry. We are going to start this morning in Chicago at our headquarters, where Speedee Labs, our global innovation center, tested and validated many of the ideas you are going to hear about today. During lunch, our guests joining in person will taste new and upgraded menu items, and afterwards we are going to head to a top-secret warehouse location to show you the McDonald's restaurant of the future. We will end the day back here at our headquarters with a reception featuring some of our key leaders from around the world. Throughout it all, you will be hearing about McDonald's NEXT, our plan to unlock the next chapter of growth and productivity to drive system and shareholder returns.

A strategic plan to further separate McDonald's from the rest of the industry. We have set our ambitions high because McDonald's is a company like no other. Every day, we serve more than 70 million customers. Our menu is iconic, reflected by our $17 billion brands. Nearly 220 million customers regularly use our app and participate in our loyalty program, making it one of the largest in the world. This provides us with more data and better insights than anyone else, an asset particularly valuable for training new AI capabilities. We have unrivaled buying power across our supply chain, and of course, our financial strength enables us to make big bets. After more than 70 years, the McDonald's brand has remained as vibrant as ever. As you will hear today, our opportunities are massive.

Our founder, Ray Kroc, he had a great line which captured the restless ambition of our system: If you're not green and growing, you're ripe and rotting. Ray had a point. That mindset has shaped McDonald's for generations. We never stood still, and today is no different. That's exactly what we've done throughout our history. To understand where we're going, it's important to reflect on where we've been. Six years ago, in 2020, we launched Accelerating the Arches. The strategy was born out of the challenges and opportunities posed by the global COVID pandemic, along with conditions unique to McDonald's. We focused our system on our three growth pillars, our MCDs, as we called them. First was to maximize our marketing.

We own one of the world's most valuable brands, and we saw a big opportunity to better connect our brand to culture, which we did through highly successful campaigns like Famous Orders and partnerships like Minecraft. Second was to commit to our core menu. This would simplify operations and recenter our marketing investment against our most beloved equities. Since we made that commitment, we've grown core menu sales more than 50%, and in the U.S., gained significant share in beef and chicken. Third was to double down on the four Ds of drive-thru, delivery, digital, and development. We anticipated that customers would increasingly favor takeaway service channels, and the phone would become the starting point for more orders. Today, sales initiated on the phone represent about 40% of total system-wide sales across our top five markets.

After years of limited new restaurant growth in our own markets, we also saw the opportunity to accelerate our pace to fill in seams where we were under-penetrated. Since then, we've added more than 6,000 restaurants, the fastest pace in our history, with more to come on our way to 50,000 restaurants. The strategy worked and shareholders were rewarded. McDonald's stock has outperformed our peers with less risk than the sector overall. Even as we stepped up our investment in the business, we continued to return significant cash to shareholders. Since 2020, we've delivered $24 billion in dividends and $14 billion in share repurchases. Few companies offer McDonald's combination of growth, stability, and cash returns. It's our secret sauce and one we guard zealously. Beyond the headline numbers, something else was happening inside of McDonald's, arguably something even more profound.

We were transforming the company for our digital-first future. Internally, our mantra was perform and transform. Our legacy technology infrastructure was outdated, inefficient, and unstable. Hundreds of finance and HR systems, every country on its own app, data puddles instead of data lakes. Technology wasn't an enabler, it was a handicap. So too was our structure. Business functions, including menu, restaurant design, pricing analytics, indirect procurement, and consumer insights were all decentralized. We've done the hard work to restructure our company and establish one McDonald's way of operating to better leverage our size and scale. This includes common technology platforms, a single enterprise data foundation, operating systems and capabilities that can be deployed across more than 46,000 restaurants. That enables us to identify opportunities faster, test them rigorously, and deploy what works more efficiently. That's just one example of how we can use our unmatched scale as a competitive weapon.

Which brings us to McDonald's Next. The advantages and capabilities that we have built, along with our financial strength, position us to grow in the areas of greatest opportunity at a time when customer expectations are once again shifting and industry dynamics will remain challenging. Customers want value, but they also want great taste and quality. Marketing is becoming more personal, more participatory, and more driven by direct customer relationships. With new service channels, restaurants are becoming more complex to run, and AI is changing how businesses operate and customers engage. At the same time, the industry growth algorithm is changing. We expect industry traffic growth in our wholly-owned markets will be flat while inflation remains elevated. For McDonald's to succeed in that environment, growth must come from capturing greater share. As you drive traffic, you get operating leverage and margins grow.

You can't count on traffic alone to drive margin expansion. It must also come from operating more productively. The winners will be the companies that create more demand and deliver it more efficiently. That makes two priorities critical to generating strong shareholder returns, share gains and productivity. We must be the first choice for more customers more often. To create the capacity to keep investing behind that growth, we need to unlock new levels of productivity across the system. That's McDonald's Next. Growth and productivity. Two sides of the same coin. We will elevate the taste, quality, and customer experience to earn more first-choice visits. More first-choice visits create guest count growth. Higher guest counts and greater productivity together improves restaurant economics. Stronger economics create the capacity to reinvest, and reinvestment makes the next turn of McDonald's growth and productivity engine stronger.

Our ability to make that engine stronger comes from our scale. The four pillars of Next each leverage the power of our scale to capture opportunities few others can match. Menu Next creates more reasons to choose McDonald's. Our focus is taste and quality across the categories with the greatest opportunity: chicken, beverages, and beef. We will elevate the menu choices customers already love, innovate where we see unmet demand, and leverage newly built category capabilities to earn share. The outcome is stronger preference, more first-choice visits, and guest count growth. Importantly, as we elevate our focus on taste and quality, value remains foundational. Great value and great taste are not competing ideas. Customers expect both, and we will deliver it. Consumer Next turns that preference into more demand.

Through loyalty, personalization, partnerships, and a deeper understanding of our customers, we will build increased frequency and create demand that drives more visits over time. Restaurant Next catalyzes growth and fuels productivity. By simplifying operations, modernizing restaurant design, and deploying AI-enabled tools at scale, we will improve execution, strengthen restaurant economics, and unlock restaurant-level efficiency. People Next turns our people advantage into hospitality at scale. Better trained, better equipped teams create better customer experiences. Hospitality and better customer experiences strengthen preference, drive repeat visits, and reinforce our growth and productivity engine. Across all four pillars, AI serves as an accelerator. It helps us understand customer behavior, innovate faster, simplify operations, and make better decisions at scale. Bringing McDonald's Next to life across our system requires a shared commitment to the customer experience. We call it Make It Golden.

It’s our multi-year, system-wide commitment to elevate the customer experience through great food and great hospitality that are uniquely McDonald’s. It calls on every supplier, franchisee, and employee to make each visit worthy of the Golden Arches. Throughout the day, you’ll see how Make It Golden supports growth and productivity across our strategy. McDonald’s NEXT will be deployed with discipline. Some improvements can begin now through stronger execution. Others will build as technology, restaurant readiness, and economics support them. We’ll sequence the work by market with a clear focus on franchisee capacity and returns. We’ve spent the last six years building new capabilities. Now it’s time to put them to work. The industry is changing. The companies that will win will be the ones that create more demand and deliver it more efficiently. We believe McDonald’s is built for that environment.

Our scale gives us better insight, stronger economics, and the ability to deploy what works faster and more effectively than anyone else in the industry. That’s what our strategy is designed to do: make McDonald’s the first choice for more customers, more often, and turn that choice into higher guest counts, stronger restaurant economics, and long-term shareholder value. Let me close with highlights of our McDonald’s NEXT commitments. Over the next few years, you’ll see the biggest upgrade to the taste and quality of our menu in McDonald’s history, driving 1.5 share points of gain in both chicken and beverages while maintaining our strong leadership in beef. You’ll see us deliver about 250 basis points of gross restaurant-level efficiency as McDonald’s NEXT elements are deployed across our wholly owned markets. You’ll see operating margins reach the low to mid 50% range by 2030.