McDonald's CEO: Chris Kempczinski

In November 2019, McDonald's chairman Rick Hernandez called Chris Kempczinski to offer him the CEO job – he had only been at the company for four years. His recent predecessors had all spent at least two decades inside McDonald's before reaching the top, and none had come from outside the restaurant industry. This is the story of how Kempczinski became CEO of the world's largest restaurant company, and what he has done since.

Key insights

• Consumer-goods outsider: Before joining McDonald’s, Kempczinski held senior roles at P&G, PepsiCo, and Kraft, bringing a brand-led background.

• Crisis-tested: His tenure has been defined by multiple challenges, including COVID-19 and an E. coli outbreak.

• Strategy architect: The “Accelerating the Arche” framework simplified McDonald's global strategy into three letters any franchisee can recite.

From Boston to Cincinnati

Christopher John Kempczinski was born in Boston in 1968 and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father was a professor at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, and his mother was a teacher at a local elementary school. His parents were ambitious and valued education, and for the young Kempczinski, getting good grades was priority number one.

His early aspiration was to become a professional soccer player, but over time, he “decided” to pursue a different path. At the age of 16, he took a dishwashing job at a breakfast restaurant, followed by a job taking tickets at an amusement park and caddying at golf courses. Kempczinski later described how those early jobs taught him valuable life lessons, such as talking to people from all walks of life and being patient.

He graduated from High School in 1987, then headed south to Duke University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics in 1991. Kempczinski spent four years in brand management at Procter & Gamble's soap division before returning to school to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1997.

A consumer goods education

After Harvard, Kempczinski joined Boston Consulting Group as a strategy consultant. By 2000, he began working for PepsiCo's corporate strategy team, one of his previous clients, and eventually became Marketing Vice President of non-carbonated beverages, overseeing brands such as Aquafina and Tropicana.

After working at PepsiCo for almost a decade, he started at Kraft Foods as senior vice president of U.S. grocery. By 2012, he was president of Kraft Canada, and in 2014, he was promoted to executive vice president of growth initiatives and president of Kraft International, with responsibility for strategy, M&A, and innovation. When Kraft merged with Heinz in 2015, Kempczinski helped to integrate the two companies before he left for McDonald's.

Throughout his career, he has been building his competence across divisions and industries. But in an interview with Ryan Roslansky (EVP of LinkedIn & Office) in The Path, he described how one specific lesson had stuck with him.

It was during his early time at P&G that he had asked his boss what the most important brand he would ever manage was, half-expecting an answer like Tide or Crest. The answer he got was the Chris Kempczinski brand. By building that brand, he created a network that eventually opened up the opportunity for him to work at McDonald's.

A four-year sprint to the top

McDonald's hired Kempczinski in late 2015 as executive vice president of strategy, reporting to then CEO Steve Easterbrook. The company was then in a rough patch as revenue had fallen from $28.1 billion in 2013 to $25.4 billion in 2015, and U.S. comparable sales had been weak for several quarters.

One factor behind this was that McDonald's was losing customers, and it was generally thought that fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Panera Bread (although not mentioned by name) were the cause. Kempczinski later described how the data told a different story: roughly 70 to 80% of McDonald's share losses were going to direct competitors like Burger King (owned by RBI) and Wendy's, not to fast-casual chains.

The fix was therefore less about reinvention and more about getting the basics right. That diagnosis fed directly into the broader turnaround plan Easterbrook and, later, Kempczinski coordinated. It was built around aggressive refranchising (with McDonald's owning fewer restaurants directly), cost discipline, and a focus on the core business. McDonald's would spend roughly $6 billion modernizing its U.S. restaurant fleet over the years that followed.

That work, more than anything else, strengthened Kempczinski's brand and reputation. In August 2016, he was announced as president of McDonald's USA, putting him in charge of around 14,000 restaurants. About three years later, in November 2019, Easterbrook was abruptly fired, and the board had to select a new CEO – and Kempczinski got the phone call. He had been at the company for only 4 years, the shortest internal tenure of any McDonald's CEO in modern memory.

The pandemic hit

His tenure as CEO would not be short on challenges, and soon thereafter, COVID-19 shut down the entire dine-in industry within weeks. The second quarter of 2020 was one of the worst in McDonald's history, with global comparable sales falling 23.9%. Most of McDonald's roughly 36,000 dining rooms were temporarily closed, and franchisees were under real financial stress. But the recovery came faster than most expected. By the fourth quarter of 2020, McDonald's global sales had recovered after an aggressive push into drive-thru, delivery, and digital ordering.

From that period, Kempczinski developed a strategy that still holds today. Beginning in November 2020, he launched Accelerating the Arches, a plan deliberately simplified with M-C-D (which is also McDonald's stock ticker). The "M" is maximizing marketing, the "C" is committing to the core menu, and the "D" is doubling down on the three D's of digital, delivery, and drive-thru.

The latter, the D, was fueled by the pandemic and saw immediate results. Across McDonald's top six markets, digital channels, kiosks, and delivery grew from around 30% of systemwide sales in early 2022 to more than 40% by the third quarter of 2023, or roughly $9 billion in that quarter alone.

During 2023, Kempczinski added a fourth D for development, with the company targeting 50,000 restaurants by the end of 2027, which would be the fastest expansion period in McDonald's history.

The simplicity is intentional. As Kempczinski has put it, a strategy known only to the CEO and his senior team is no strategy at all. M-C-D is a framework that any franchisee, in any market, can easily recall.

Tested in 2024, holding up underneath

In 2024, new challenges arrived. Inflation had increased McDonald's average menu prices by roughly 40% compared to five years earlier, and lower-income customers, who make up a meaningful share of traffic, were increasingly choosing to eat at home.

On top of that, in October that same year, an E. coli outbreak linked to slivered onions caused customer visits to drop by between 6-10% nationally in the days following the announcement. In Colorado, where the outbreak was most severe, it dropped nearly a third.

Kempczinski's response was direct. He apologized publicly, stopped all deliveries from the underlying facility indefinitely, and reminded investors that the last serious public-health issue tied to McDonald's in the U.S. had occurred more than 40 years earlier.

By early 2025, the company had launched a new concept called McValue, anchored by the $5 Meal Deal it had introduced the previous summer. Later that year, it also revived Extra Value Meals, all aimed at regaining lower-income traffic. On an earnings call, he was explicit with his ambitions:

By the third quarter of 2025, the picture had improved. Global comparable sales rose 3.6%, and systemwide sales were above $36 billion.

Despite challenges throughout Kempczinski's tenure, the underlying model has held up well. The refranchising and core-business focus he helped shape has produced a system that makes more with less revenue. Reported revenue has fallen from roughly $28 billion in 2013 to around $26 billion in 2024 as more restaurants moved into franchisee hands. However, adjusted operating margins reached 46.3% in 2024, compared with around 30% almost a decade earlier, making McDonald's business more resilient and predictable by design.

Closing thoughts

Kempczinski became CEO of a company for which he was not an obvious candidate. He grew up with a strong work ethic, built a solid educational foundation, and shaped the Chris Kempczinski brand throughout his career. It eventually led to him becoming the obvious choice for the McDonald's CEO position. His big strategic bet, Accelerating the Arches, has done what it was designed to do: turn a large and complex global business into a framework any franchisee can recite. Whether the coming years will deliver depends on how well that strategy continues to hold up.