Americans spent $22.3 billion on fast food last year. The average fast food customer spends 45 minutes in line at the drive-thru line, 90 seconds queuing up at the front counter, an hour in a restaurant and 90 minutes at the drive-thru line.
The race for the fast food quick kill game is hot — so much so that the McRally got a ringtone. A voice says, “New drop by on the highway.” Others say, “Not enough fries.”
For McDonald’s, McDonald’s ’25 percent’ entry into the production of its own Chicken McNuggets marks the beginning of a corporate strategy to increase supply of the white meat, which is experiencing a global shortage.
“If we could swing fast enough from white meat to all protein, we could deliver fries every minute of every day,” said Chris Kempczinski, president of McDonald’s USA.
In fact, the company has long planned a change that would allow it to serve 24,000 pounds of white meat daily. Here in McDonald’s land, a slew of moves are in the works including a new Coffee and a new Egg McMuffin. Also on the horizon are a Neighborhood Store in an apartment building and the re-launch of the McShake, the little-known Big Mac hybrid.
The move toward 100 percent cage-free eggs has already sent sales through the roof. Rakesh Gupta, McDonald’s director of research and development says, “It has more than doubled our sales in cage-free eggs. That’s right, a government mandated requirement sent our sales soaring, and, at the same time, given us control over feeding our animals without disturbing the very cage-free farmers we need to feed.”
Gupta adds, “These developments show the extent to which McDonald’s has learned from its customers. Our menu is very Darwinian, and so they clearly have taught us that we need to listen to them or else… they are really going to fly off.”
McDonald’s experts cite other developments like handing over cartons of its burgers to consumers in exchange for cash or free Wi-Fi while avoiding contentious public issues like the minimum wage and curbs on menu advertising to children.
For all this, Kevin Crossland, McDonald’s lead inventor on Monopoly related technology, was cited by other executives as a key to McDonald’s ascendancy.
Crossland was so powerful he is expected to become its own “Chief Innovation Officer.” He thinks, “we’re all lucky to have this access to all of this, to McDonald’s corporate culture, to McDonald’s desire to do whatever it takes to do the business.”
Come 2021, this age of technology-pumped customization will have made McDonald’s one of the great cultures of the world. The company is so pumped about this pipeline that it is planning a U.S. IPO for the company.
This article was written by Meghan Marks for FoxNews.com.