✦ The Future BetsNarrow moat

A company that already feeds sixty million people a day does not need a new industry. McDonald's future bets are therefore unglamorous by design — more buildings, more drinks, more members, better software — and that is exactly what makes them gradable: every one has a number and a date attached.

The largest is arithmetic: roughly 45,000 restaurants at the end of 2025 heading for 50,000, the fastest expansion in the brand's history¹ — though the target already slipped from 2027 to 2028 as a pressured consumer and construction inflation slowed the pace². The most interesting is liquid: after killing its CosMc's spinoff in 2025, McDonald's kept the drinks and is putting them into McCafé nationwide from May 2026 — refreshers, crafted sodas and energy drinks aimed at the highest-margin category in fast food³. The quietest compounding is the loyalty file: nearly 210 million ninety-day active users across 70-plus markets at the end of 2025, driving about $40 billion of systemwide sales, with management targeting 250 million members and $45 billion by the end of 2027⁴. And underneath all of it sits the plumbing — a Google Cloud partnership putting real computers, not just point-of-sale terminals, inside the restaurants⁵.

Read them together and a pattern emerges that is very McDonald's: not one of these bets requires the company to be right about the future. More restaurants sell more of what already sells. Drinks ride a menu and a drive-thru that already exist. Loyalty digitizes a customer who was already coming. The technology makes existing restaurants faster. This is compounding, not speculation — the opposite of the moonshot portfolios elsewhere in this app.

So grade them on execution, not vision. The unit target already slipped once; a second slip would say the value squeeze is structural rather than cyclical. Watch beverage attachment rates after May, watch the loyalty file's march toward 250 million, and watch the one number that ties them all together — comparable sales, which decelerated to +1.3% globally in the second quarter of 2026. Every bet on this page exists to push that line back up. If it stays near zero while the restaurant count climbs, the growth is being bought rather than earned.