McDonald’s backs home delivery service with largest rollout yet

McDonald’s has expanded its food delivery service in partnership with Uber to 4,200 more restaurants in 13 countries – its largest expansion since the fast food giant began trialling the service in Australia three years ago.

Since debuting in 2014, McDelivery has been rolled out across 3,500 restaurants in the US. It uses UberEats, the recent food delivery side-business from car-sharing app Uber, to deliver McDonald’s menu items to consumers at home or at work.

The service will now be available to consumers in New Zealand, the Netherlands, France, Poland and Hong Kong. According to McDonald’s, it brings the total number of participating restaurants to 7,800 worldwide, spread across 47 different countries.

The move reaffirms McDonald’s commitment to making food delivery one of the pillars of future growth creation – along with mobile payment and digital ordering in store. In May, FoodBev reported that the company was competing with Burger King to become the first to implement a full rollout of its mobile ordering system.

Yesterday, McDonald’s reported a 6.6% increase in comparable global sales, reflecting positive guest counts in all segments. Revenue stood 3% lower at $6.05 billion, while net income was 28% higher at $1.4 billion.

McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook said: “We are excited to bring this new level of convenience to more of our customers around the globe, delivering on our commitment to transform the customer experience in and out of our restaurants.”

As well as mobile payment and digital ordering in store, McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook sees food delivery as a kingpin of future growth creation.

The chain will mark the expansion with ‘Global McDelivery Day’, including activations in all markets where McDelivery is available. They include surprise deliveries for McDelivery customers and one-off merchandise opportunities – including onesies, picnic blankets and hoodies all adorned with McDonald’s products like Big Macs and fries.

Easterbrook added: “Global McDelivery Day is our way of celebrating the expansion of delivery while highlighting McDonald’s ability to give our customers the great-tasting food they love at McDonald’s, where they want to enjoy it.

“With 75% of the population in our top markets in the world less than three miles from a McDonald’s, we are well positioned to meet the untapped demand of delivery for our customers.”

“We are excited to celebrate our global expansion with McDonald’s,” said Jason Droege, head of UberEverything – the division of Uber working on expanding its product offering beyond rides. “UberEats is happy to make food delivery easy at the push of a button whether you’re enjoying a McNuggets picnic with a side of fresh air or hanging back at home with a Big Mac and matching pillowcase.”

Delivery is just one of the ways that McDonald’s continues to raise the bar for its customers. Last year, McDonald’s made changes to its menu including removing artificial preservatives from several menu items including chicken nuggets.

McDonald’s is transforming the customer experience through more modern restaurants featuring self-order kiosks and table service – and with mobile ordering and payment, which will roll out later this year to 20,000 restaurants around the world.

It faces competition on that front from Burger King, as well as more generally from the likes of Domino’s Pizza, which for the past few years has experimented with emerging payment platforms such as smart watches, smart TVs, text, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger.

In April 2016, Domino’s launched a ‘zero-click app’ that allows consumers to automatically order a saved pizza preference by loading up the application and waiting for the ten-second timer to expire. And in December, it added the option for consumers to order through Google Home, the technology giant’s voice-activated assistant, by using the phrase ‘OK Google, talk to Domino’s’.