McDonald’s is expected to start opening a new chain of “small format” restaurants called CosMc’s” early next year, CEO Chris Kempczinski announced Thursday during a second quarter earnings conference call.
“Our new business ventures team is in the process of developing a new concept we will call CosMc’s, which we will test in a small, handful of sites in a limited geography beginning early next year,” he said. “CosMc’s is a small format concept with all the DNA of McDonald’s but its own unique personality.”
According to CNN Business, “CosMc” is a reference to a McDonaldand character described by the McDonald’s fandom wiki as “an alien character” who appeared in McDonald’s commercials. While Ronald McDonald has continued to be a popular mascot by the company, other McDonaldland characters have not been seen much since the 1990s – The Takeout reported on the history of the fictional universe in 2020.
However, McDonald’s did pull out the “Grimace” character for a marketing campaign this year – and it went viral on TikTok. Company leadership remarked on the success of the campaign during Thursday’s call.
Kempczinski also mentioned that McDonald’s is working on modernizing its geographic footprint in the U.S.
“Our footprint reflects what the population looked like probably 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. “There’s a number of places around the U.S. where we are significantly underdeveloped relative to where the population exists today. That opens up for us a whole bunch of development opportunities for us to go after.”
In particular, Kempczinski mentioned population growth in the southeast. He added that the rise of food delivery services has opened up new possibilities for McDonald’s when it comes to store real estate.
“You don’t necessarily need the big dining rooms that you needed in our traditional restaurants,” Kempczinski explained. These changes will shape how McDonald’s plans its real estate plan over the next five years.
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