Will McDonald’s Bigger Burgers Help Sales?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Will McDonald’s Bigger Burgers Help Sales?

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McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD | MCD Price Prediction) has started to sell bigger, better burgers. Investors can watch as the fast-food giant finds out if its experiment will work. The first announcement of the “best burgers ever” was made in April last year. Customers would get softer buns, more Big Mac sauce, carefully melted cheese, and new white onions. After almost 10 months, the products are available at thousands of locations.

Some of the changes are simple. There will be six patties on a grill at once, not eight as the practice used to be. Employees will not have to squeeze them so that eight will fit. When the kick-off was first announced, Chef Chad Schafer, Senior Director of Culinary Innovation at McDonald’s USA, said, “We found that small changes, like tweaking our process to get hotter, meltier cheese and adjusting our grill settings for a better sear, added up to a big difference in making our burgers more flavorful than ever.” (These 16 countries have unique McDonald’s menus.)

Will Anyone Care?

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McDonald’s management will find out if anyone cares in the next few weeks. It is the largest fast-food company in America by far. Zippia put its revenue at $23 billion for 2022 (McDonald’s will announce 2023 revenue soon). Pizza Hut follows McDonald’s at $12 billion and Subway at $9 billion. Neither is a direct competitor, based on the menu. Burger King and Wendy’s are, and each has about $2 billion in revenue.

The last time McDonald’s reported financials was for the quarter that ended September 30. U.S. same-store sales surged 8.1% year over year. Globally, they rose 8.8%. Revenue grew 14% to $6.7 billion, while net income increased 17% to $2.3 billion.

The new burger upgrade numbers will not appear in the fourth-quarter figures. However, management will get to disclose early results of the change for the quarter that started at the beginning of this year.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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