McDonald’s anticipates that 2025 will be “another challenging year” for the fast food chain which has seen inflation-hit customers pare back discretionary spending.
Chris Kempczinski, the company’s chief executive officer, told a business gathering in Boston on Thursday that the Big Mac maker is girding for more turbulence ahead.
“We’re starting to talk about 2025, and my message to our teams has been: ‘We need to be preparing for another challenging year’,” Kempczinski said in remarks at a Boston College Chief Executives Club event.
“We need to be making sure that we’ve got a really strong value proposition in all of our markets.”
Kempczinski’s comments were reported by Bloomberg News.
McDonald’s revealed its first quarterly same-store sales drop in four years this past July.
The company’s stock has seesawed this year as it struggled to win back penny-pinching customers put off by sky-high prices.
In July, shares of McDonald’s were down more than 17% from Jan. 1.
Since then, however, the stock has recovered – rallying for a 25% gain since the end of July.
McDonald’s stock was up 2% on Friday.
As of 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, it was trading at slightly more than $304 a share.
In recent years, inflation has sent the price of McDonald’s menu items soaring.
In some locations, a Big Mac meal can cost as much as $18.
To win back consumers, McDonald’s rolled out a special $5 value meal that includes a McDouble burger or McChicken sandwich, small fries, a four-piece Chicken McNuggets and a small drink.
Last month, the company announced that it would extend the value meal, which was originally intended to be a limited-time-only offer, until December at most restaurants in the US.
It’s the second time McDonald’s has extended the deal.
The smaller value meals were cited as the reason that a major french fries supplier, Lamb Weston, slashed jobs and abruptly closed a factory last week.
Kempczinski said on Thursday that McDonald’s will aim to offer more affordable meals by including chicken-based items on the menu since poultry is more than half the cost of beef on a per-pound basis.
“It’s easier to deliver value on chicken products than it is on beef products,” Kempczinski said.
Last week, McDonald’s filed suit against the meat industry’s “Big Four” – Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef Packing Company – and their subsidiaries.
McDonald’s alleged in the suit that the companies were colluding with one another to artificially inflate the price of beef.
This collusion caused the beef market to become “a monopoly in which direct purchasers were forced to buy at prices dictated by (the meat packers),” McDonald’s suit reads — later noting that the injury it has sustained as one of those buyers is what “antitrust laws were designed to prevent.”
McDonald’s alleges that the meat packers’ conspiracy dates back nearly a decade, at least as early as January 2015, and continues today.
Its suit argues these companies’ actions violate the Sherman Act, a federal antitrust law.
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