How we optimised the McDonald’s menu

How many items can you list from a McDonald’s menu? 5? 10? 20? (Wow, you must be a big fan!) Believe it or not, diners are given up to 100 items to choose from in McDonald’s restaurants across the UK — making the fast food menu slow to understand and even slower to deliver.

Incite’s unique Research approach

You’ll find McDonald’s customers everywhere in the country; 3.5 million of them head to the ‘Golden Arches’ for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or dessert each day. A customer base of this size is a researcher’s dream; full of valuable insights and behaviour to explore. But there’s also the challenge of loyalty. If you start making changes to a well-loved brand, how will consumers react? Knowing that menu optimisation at the world’s largest fast food chain shouldn’t be taken lightly, Incite harnessed the collective power of customer voice — using a uniquely sophisticated ‘interactive conjoint’ questionnaire to reach 5000 McDonald’s customers within the UK. Replicating the at-the-counter experience, respondents could choose from over 100 items as if they were ordering in-store. This allowed us to deconstruct consumer choice architecture and better understand the myriad ways McDonald’s serves its customers day in, day out.

What did we find out for McDonald’s? 

Our research allowed us to step into consumer’s shoes, as if standing at the counter with them.  From here, we were able to rationalise (and simplify!) the menu in a way that kept loyal customers happy and made each shift a little easier for McDonald’s kitchen workers. But the most important take-away — if you’ll excuse the pun — was that a number of items could be dropped from the menu without any negative impact on demand. Today, the chain’s 1000-plus UK kitchens flow more smoothly and customers keep returning in their millions. Better still, Incite’s research highlighted ways that McDonald’s could better serve its customer base in the future, too. With customer-centric innovation in the pipeline, McDonald’s can hold on to its market dominance and ‘fast food’ promise for many years to come. Read more from WARC on our menu optimisation work for McDonalds UK.