By Jordan Hollander, Co-founder of HotelTechReport - 3.18.2025
McDonald’s is undertaking one of its most significant structural shifts in recent memory, with a clear mandate: move faster and decentralize hospitality systems decision making and deployment. Under the leadership of CEO Chris Kempczinski, the company is reorganizing its operations, supply chain, development, and innovation teams to cut through bureaucracy and bring new products and technologies to market faster.
Hospitality is Changing at a Rapid Clip
This move comes at a critical time. The fast-food giant is facing a sluggish environment. Global same-store sales plateaued in 2024 after years of growth, signaling saturation and consumer fatigue. Overall U.S. restaurant traffic declined by 2.8% in the same period and is expected to drop again, indicating larger macroeconomic pressures. Consumers are increasingly price-sensitive, questioning the value proposition of fast food amid inflationary pressures and shifting dining habits. McDonald’s also faces increased competition from fast-casual brands and delivery-focused digital players. The stakes are high as McDonald’s aims to reach 50,000 restaurants by 2027, up from 43,500 today—a bold target that will require not just scale, but sustained customer loyalty and operational excellence.
Leading Operators Are Reinventing Agile Org Charts
At the heart of this transformation is the creation of a new Chief Restaurant Experience Officer role, to be filled by Jill McDonald. Her remit is expansive, overseeing operations, supply chain, franchising, development, design, delivery, and innovation. This centralization is designed to eliminate inefficiencies that arise from departmental silos, enabling the company to pivot quickly when market dynamics shift. Importantly, she will also manage category leads for beef, chicken, and beverages—ensuring that product innovation aligns with consumer demand and operational realities. This direct line of sight between category strategy and restaurant execution represents a fundamental shift in how McDonald’s approaches product lifecycle management.
Hospitality Tech Stack Optimization Comes into Focus
Kempczinski has been candid about the need for speed and operator-first thinking. He pointed to the company’s seven-year process to improve its core burgers as evidence that McDonald’s can no longer afford slow innovation cycles. This acknowledgment is a clear pivot from legacy processes to agile development methodologies and hospitality tech stack optimization at the unit level. In his words, this new structure is about ensuring one person views all new technology and menu initiatives through the eyes of a restaurant general manager. The implications are profound: products and technologies will now be designed with usability, training, and immediate impact in mind, reducing friction for franchisees and staff.
This approach mirrors what the hospitality industry has experienced with the deployment of technologies that are only successful if they integrate seamlessly into operations. Examples include dynamic pricing tools, which allow restaurant menus to adjust pricing based on demand, events, or seasonality — helping operators maximize revenue without alienating customers. Self check-in kiosks have reduced wait times, improved guest satisfaction, and lowered operational costs, provided they are intuitive and do not disrupt existing workflows. Delivery channel managers help streamline third-party delivery orders, consolidating them into a single operational flow and reducing manual errors in the same way that hotel channel managers distribute rates, availability and inventory to online travel agencies. For McDonald’s, adopting this operator-first mindset means future technology deployments, whether AI-driven drive-thru systems or digital menu boards, must be practical, reduce operational complexity, and deliver measurable improvements in efficiency and guest satisfaction.
Lessons for the Hospitality Industry
The strategic lesson for the broader restaurant industry is clear. Innovation efforts that do not factor in operational complexity and frontline execution are destined to fall short. It is not enough to roll out new digital experiences or menu items if the store teams are unprepared or if the supply chain cannot support them. Companies need to rethink their innovation processes, moving from boardroom ideation to field-level co-creation. This approach fosters stronger franchisee relationships, higher adoption rates, and ultimately better customer experiences.
Borrowing from Consumer Packaged Goods
This realignment also takes cues from the consumer packaged goods world, where speed to market and tight alignment between product development and distribution are critical. McDonald’s now applies this mindset to foodservice, acknowledging that today’s consumers are not just looking for novelty but also convenience, reliability, and value. By adopting CPG-style portfolio management, McDonald’s can make faster decisions on when to launch, iterate, or sunset products, ensuring that only the most resonant items remain on menus.
Another noteworthy aspect of this shift is the emphasis on category ownership. Having dedicated leaders for beverages and desserts, for example, allows McDonald’s to close gaps where customers might visit competitors for specific products. By addressing these blind spots, the company aims to grow market share in key categories like beef, chicken, and coffee. This focus on category leadership also facilitates better supplier relationships, faster product testing, and the ability to respond to localized market trends with more agility.
Implications for Hospitality Executives
The implications for restaurant executives are profound. Top-down tech rollouts or menu decisions made in corporate isolation are no longer sustainable. Instead, organizations must build cross-functional teams that integrate operations, supply chain, and consumer insights. Success in the current climate requires agility and alignment. Executives should consider whether they have dedicated leadership for each major product category and whether those leaders have the autonomy to act quickly. Additionally, empowering franchise operators and frontline managers to provide feedback and influence strategic decisions can lead to more successful deployments and stronger brand loyalty.
If even McDonald’s, with its scale and resources, has recognized the need for structural change to keep pace, every restaurant brand should be reevaluating its org chart. Do you have the right people in place to translate strategy into frontline execution? Are you empowering store-level leaders to inform innovation? And are you moving quickly enough to stay ahead in an industry where consumer behavior is shifting faster than ever? McDonald’s new structure is more than a reorganization. It is a call to action for the industry: align innovation with real-world operations, accelerate decision-making, and put operators at the center of strategy. Brands that can’t move with this level of clarity and speed risk falling behind in an increasingly unforgiving market.
Jordan Hollander is the co-founder of HotelTechReport, the hotel industry’s app store where millions of professionals discover tech tools to transform their businesses. He was previously on the Global Partnerships team at Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Prior to his work with SPG, Jordan was Director of Business Development at MWT Hospitality and an equity analyst at Wells Capital Management. Jordan received his MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management where he was a Zell Global Entrepreneurship Scholar and a Pritzker Group Venture Fellow.
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