McDonald's has identified chicken and beverages as its next major growth engines, but both categories are crowded with specialists already winning more of its customers' spending.
At its September investor event, McDonald's said it aimed to gain 1.5 percentage points of global market share in both chicken and beverages by 2030. Management described chicken as a roughly $130 billion category where McDonald's holds about 20% share, and beverages as a $230 billion category where it holds about 10%.
The opportunity is large because McDonald's already has distribution, brand recognition and purchasing scale. The company plans hand-breaded chicken products, the return of grilled chicken and broader beverage formats. It also expects its NEXT strategy to require about $3 billion of annual baseline capital spending from 2027 through 2030, plus $1.5 billion to $2 billion of cumulative support for restaurant deployment.
Consumer Edge data reported by CNBC shows why execution matters. Among McDonald's customers, Chick-fil-A gained 0.58 percentage points of limited-service restaurant spending in the third quarter from a year earlier. Four coffee chains, including Starbucks, Dutch Bros, Dunkin and 7 Brew, collectively gained 0.88 percentage points.
The card data has limits. It tracks where customers spend, not which menu item they buy, and it cannot prove that chicken or coffee alone caused McDonald's share loss. It does show that category specialists are capturing a larger portion of the same customers' budgets.
McDonald's still held the largest individual share of limited-service spending in the dataset, and management said U.S. comparable sales improved during September after slightly negative results in July and August. That creates a measurable near-term test: whether new menu platforms can lift traffic and average spending without relying excessively on discounting.
The strategy is credible because the addressable categories are large and McDonald's system can scale successful products quickly. The risk is that investment arrives before sustained demand. Investors should watch market-share changes, U.S. comparable sales, franchisee economics and the return on the added capital required by the NEXT plan.