Semafor · Nov 5, 2026 · 51m · 41m saved
With Chris Kempczinski, Chairman and CEO of McDonald's
Photo: Bob Coscarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia
Wealthier diners are visiting fast-food restaurants more often, by mid-to-high single digits, while low-income traffic has fallen by the same amount. Chris Kempczinski, chairman and CEO of McDonald's, told Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Liz Hoffman on Semafor's The CEO Signal that this split is nothing like 2008, when the pain was shared, and that his own company made it worse with a value launch that many restaurants never ran.
"We had a misfire on some value stuff that we were launching in April... we had about 30% of our restaurants were not actually executing what they had committed." — Chris Kempczinski
Chris has run McDonald's through six years of building a single global tech stack and loyalty platform, and he is now asking franchisees to fund the next plan, McDonald's Next, with remodels averaging $800,000 to $1.2 million a restaurant.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 51 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Low-income traffic is down mid-to-high single digits, while high-income traffic is up by the same
An April value launch underperformed because about 30% of restaurants didn't run it
Chicken is a $130 billion market in McDonald's top 10 markets, where it holds about 20%
Beef is smaller, and McDonald's already holds over 40% of it
Franchisees' remodel bill nets down to roughly what a required remodel costs anyway, Chris says
Big ad budgets matter less than they did in the broadcast era
Voice ordering in the drive-thru always keeps a human who can take over
Chris drives change by praising the people already doing it, not calling out the ones who aren't
1. A Mid-Career Outside Hire
Chris grew up in Cincinnati in a strict Catholic household, the son of a doctor and a schoolteacher. He described himself as restless and driven rather than a rule breaker, which he thinks suits a job where the chief executive sets the speed for everyone else.
Chris Kempczinski says a company moves only as fast as its CEO
"The company is never going to go faster than the pace that the CEO sets. The CEO sets the pace for the rest of the company." — Chris Kempczinski
He worked at Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and Kraft before joining McDonald's about a decade ago, at around age 44. The move carried two risks. Senior people at McDonald's tend to stay 30 to 40 years, and the CEO at the time was his own age, so the top job looked out of reach.
McDonald's rarely hires senior people from outside
"I think too McDonald's is a very much a legacy company... it's not very common to have people particularly at senior levels come in from the outside." — Chris Kempczinski
What tipped the decision was personal. His family went to McDonald's on Friday nights after football games when he was growing up.
