McDonald’s Tested 1 Idea in 2 Very Different U.S. Cities. The Lessons It Learned Were Surprising

People say we’re a divided country. And we are.

But McDonald’s apparently found one thing that McDonald’s customers have in common in very different places: specifically, San Francisco and Dallas.

These are the two metro areas where McDonald’s decided in 2022 to test the appeal of a plant-based sandwich called the McPlant. Despite all the hype about plant-based proteins over the past few years, McDonald’s customers in both places had the same reaction.

They weren’t lovin’ it.  

As Joe Erlinger, the president of McDonald’s USA, explained Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum in Chicago:

It was not successful in either market. 

And so I don’t think the U.S. consumer is coming to McDonald’s looking for the McPlant or any other plant-based proteins. …

The bigger trend around protein consumption is really around chicken, and we think we’re poised to serve that trend well, and that’s where we’re making investments.

Quick aside to savor the clinical way McDonald’s sometimes refers to its business and its products, like trends in “protein consumption.” A few years back I had a fun chuckle when McDonald’s similarly said one of its goals was to become a “credible chicken player.”

“Hey honey, want to try this new credible chicken player that opened down the street?”

Not all that appetizing. But, back to the more recent news about what McDonald’s learned was unappetizing.

Even though plant-based protein is a very 21st-century concept, Erlinger reached back to a key lesson that he said the founder of McDonald’s learned and promoted in the 20th century. 

In short, as Erlinger put it, the key to success is “serving more of what customers want than anybody else.”

I’m not sure if he was referring here to the original McDonald brothers as the founder(s), or to Ray Kroc. But, it’s OK because there are good examples of both the brothers and Kroc reading from the same page on this issue.

To my mind, it goes all the way back to 1948, when the McDonald brothers closed down their pretty successful original California barbeque restaurant to rebuild and relaunch as a place that basically sold only hamburgers.

As a corollary, I think we can confidently add that not spending too much effort serving what customers don’t want is a good idea as well.

Look, chicken is hot, as in trendy. As my colleague Jason Aten wrote here recently, there’s a reason why McDonald’s competitor Chick-fil-A got the highest customer service rating from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Actually, there’s more than one reason, but the fact that Americans love chicken is clearly one of them. I don’t think Chick-fil-A would be as successful if it had been named Plant-Based-Protein-fil-A.

And while advocates of plant-based protein say it’s better for the environment (although there are some dissenting opinions), the McDonald’s experience suggests we’re simply not a country that’s convinced it’s something we want.

I honestly don’t know if that’s good or bad for the world in the long run.

But given everything else going on around us today, maybe we can take a little solace in the idea that Americans can agree on something.