Where’s the beef?
Just ask Ronald McDonald. The world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain is getting ready to roll out its biggest, “most satiating” hamburger ever.
The Big Arch—a whopping 14 ounces and 1,025 calories—is on the grill to become McDonald’s first new global offering since Chicken McNuggets landed on the permanent “core” menu in 1983.
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“It’s a quintessential McDonald’s burger with a twist on our iconic, familiar flavors,” McDonald’s president and CEO Chris Kempczinski told Wall Street analysts on a call Monday.
The Big Arch features two patties, melted cheese, “crispy toppings,” and a “tangy McDonald's sauce.” It is currently available in only two countries, Portugal and Canada, with plans to launch in Germany in late August.
The giant burger news comes as McDonald’s admitted sales worldwide dropped for the first time since 2020 and revealed it’s planning a “comprehensive rethink” to turn the business around.
“Consumers still recognize us as the value leader versus our key competitors, but it's clear that our value leadership gap has recently shrunk,” Kempczinski said. “We are working to fix that with pace.”
In corporate speak, pace means speed. Last April, McDonald's warned that customers were feeling the inflation pinch and were looking for more value and lower prices, turning toward arch rivals Burger King and Dominos.
The stakes are huge as competition heats up over the trillion global fast food market.
The Big Arch is already available in Portugal and comes packaged like this. It is also being tested in Canada.
Twitter“It’s a street fight,” CFO Ian Borden told analysts in April, according to Restaurant Business Online. “Everybody is fighting for fewer consumers. We have to make sure we have that street fighting capability.”
Around the world, McDonald's sells 2.5 billion hamburgers every year or 75 burgers every second. And the company wants take an even bigger bite out of the global market. Some 50 billion burgers are sold every year in the US alone.
The rollout of the Big Arch is not without risk. McDonald’s has seen its share of high-profile misfires. The most notable flop was the launch of the Arch Deluxe in 1996, a premium burger targeted at upscale adults. Despite a $300 million marketing campaign—the most expensive in fast food history—the Arch Deluxe bombed with consumers because of its high price and a misguided attempt to market the burger to urban sophisticates.
McDonald’s has offered no details about when the Big Arch will debut in the US. But when it finally arrives, it will also launch globally in over 100 countries and nearly 42,000 stores.
“In the past, you would have seen us try and get after that opportunity in 20 different markets in 20 different ways,” CFO Borden said in March. “And then you don’t have the ability to build a global equity that you can drive at scale.”
