Pandemic drives McDonald’s home delivery to record levels

The hunger for a Big Mac during the coronavirus pandemic has helped drive online delivery orders for McDonald’s to record levels.

The number of McDonald’s meals delivered to people’s homes has doubled. Picture: AFP

The hunger for a Big Mac, Happy Meal or french fries during the coronavirus pandemic has helped drive online delivery orders for McDonald’s to record levels, with the proportion of meal orders now delivered in Australia doubling to 10 per cent since the COVID-19 crisis began.

And to bolster its delivery fleet, McDonald’s has decided to roll out its own in-house network of drivers to reach regional and country towns and complement its existing third-party deals with external suppliers such as Uber­Eats, The Australian can reveal.

According to a recent McDonald’s update, like-for-like sales in Australia have returned to positive growth from May and were still positive in July. Online delivery proved especially popular with sales delivered to people’s homes rising from 5 per cent before COVID-19 hit to now sit at 10 per cent.

McDonald’s Australia chief executive Andrew Gregory told The Australian that such was the popularity of the online delivery offer at the fast-food chain that it decided to bring on its own in-house drivers to ensure it was able to deliver to customers living outside major capital cities and regional centres.

“Online delivery was about 5 per cent of our business before COVID-19 and already a strong part of our business with 600 restaurants. I think what we recognised straight away, as trends were accelerated during COVID-19, was delivery.

“So we increased our delivery, and we have a few formats by which we deliver — one of which is through third party providers such as UberEats, Deliveroo and DoorDash, and we increased the number of restaurants using those platforms.

“Then we also expanded from 600 restaurants to now where we are offering from 900 restaurants — so that is basically every one of our restaurants except for those in food courts. And then part of that expansion from 600 to 900 restaurants was what we have called our own self-delivery model where we use Menulog as the menu aggregator, but as opposed to Uber that does the physical delivery, we now do that delivery.’’

Mr Gregory said the benefit of this format was it allowed McDonald’s to reach previously out-of-reach country towns that may have wanted McDonald’s as a food delivery service option.

“Medium or smallish-sized country towns where the third-party providers are not there, it is a really good example of us still being agile, taking quick opportunities to serve that community.’’

In June, US multinational McDonald’s Corporation singled out the Australian arm of its global hamburger empire as one of its best performing regions during the coronavirus pandemic, with the local chain’s drive-through proving an invaluable asset for contactless food sales.

McDonald’s chief financial officer Kevin Ozan highlighted Australia as a very strong market.

“Australia has probably been one of the stronger markets certainly as they remained open similar to the US. They’ve seen big increases in drive-through business and they’ve been kind of consistently remaining positive comp sales,’’ Mr Ozan said in June.