McDonald’s is launching a new kind of restaurant, CosMc’s, an old-fashioned store offering customizable desserts and drinks including “cold s’mores,” a “churro frappe,” and a “turmeric latte” that could compete with chains like Starbucks.
Fast food company It said it would open its first pilot site in a Chicago suburb near its headquarters this month, as part of an effort to “solve the 3 p.m. slump,” when it gets fewer customers between the lunch and dinner periods.
The proposed menu features a range of specialty lemonades, blended drinks and teas in flavors such as “pear salt” and “tropical spice” that can be customized with tapioca pearls, flavored syrups and energy or vitamin C shots.
Drinks will be sold alongside simple food offerings, which will include the chain’s regular Egg McMuffin sandwiches, as well as hash browns and pretzels, muffins, cookies, ice cream, and new spicy queso sandwiches and tomato avocado sandwiches.
McDonald’s plans to launch about 10 CosMc locations by the end of next year in unnamed locations in Texas. The results of the trial will be studied for at least a year before deciding whether to expand.
CosMc aims to fill the slack in mid-afternoon sales by offering drinks that are too complex for its existing restaurants, said company president and CEO Chris Kempczinski. “This is a $100 billion category that is growing faster than the rest [casual dining] And with superior margins. “It’s a space we believe we have a right to win,” he said.
The new stores are named after a part-alien, part-robot that McDonald’s launched in the late 1980s. CosMc – who had antennae, more than six arms, and wore a round silver spacesuit – appeared in the movie Advertisement series Until the early 1990s.
The CosMc pilot was unveiled on Wednesday as McDonald’s told investors in an all-day conference that it plans to open nearly 10,000 new restaurants around the world over the next four years. The unprecedented expansion will bring the chain’s total number of stores to 50,000.
This compares with Starbucks, which said last month that it plans to expand its global presence to 55,000 stores worldwide by 2030, up from 38,000 currently.
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McDonald’s plans to open 900 new stores in the United States and 1,900 stores in international markets where the company operates and owns restaurant franchises such as Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. It plans to establish another 7,000 stores in international markets operated by licensees, more than half of them in China.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
