Hello, everyone, and good morning. Welcome to McDonald's 2023 Investor Update. Thank you to everyone for joining us, both all of you on the live stream and all of you gathered here with us today in McDonald's headquarters in Chicago, or MHQ, as we like to call it. It's a real privilege to be with all of you today, and we are excited about the day ahead. Just a few housekeeping points before we jump in. As many of you are aware, we issued a press release this morning summarizing highlights from today's presentation, and we'll also post key slides from this meeting on our website. Now, over the next 90 minutes, the McDonald's senior leadership team will bring you through how we're evolving our Accelerating the Arches strategy to drive growth both in the near and long term.
Then we'll take a break from the live stream for lunch and rotations here in Chicago. We'll regroup around 1:30 P.M. Central Time to bring you through how we're reimagining our future before we close with a Q&A session. We have so much to share with you today on how we'll continue to grow the business and provide more personalized and convenient experiences for our customers. Now, before we get started, let's take a minute to reflect on our past.
We have a great many new things in our future. We're living in a rapidly changing world, so McDonald's will change with it.
We've got amazing momentum. We're finding fresh ways to make our fans smile... and turning up the heat on the classics they love. Making it easier to enjoy McDonald's wherever, whenever they want. But that's just the start. We're changing the game again, building the most powerful fan platform in the universe and redefining what a restaurant can be.
Please welcome McDonald's President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Kempczinski.
Good morning, everybody. On behalf of the entire global senior leadership team at McDonald's, welcome to our investor update. The last time we came together in November of 2020, I said we were at the start of something new for McDonald's. While our business was performing well, we believed we could do even better, and we announced our Accelerating the Arches growth strategy. We were building from a position of strength back then, and our fidelity to our Accelerating the Arches strategy has further strengthened our business. Accelerating the Arches encompassed all aspects of our business, including purpose, values, and our MCD growth pillars that built on our inherent competitive advantages. M stood for maximize our marketing and the world-class, culturally relevant creative to reignite our brand and drive growth.
C stood for commit to our core and the power of iconic favorites to drive customer demand while simplifying operations. D stood for doubling down on what we called at the time, the three Ds of drive-thru, digital, and delivery. Since 2020, we've grown these three channels across our top markets and now have the largest individual drive-thru, digital, and delivery businesses in the restaurant industry by a wide margin. These channels are as relevant today, confirming our belief that off-premise would be the preferred customer order experience. In fact, we have even more opportunity to build on our leadership in each of these three Ds. As you heard earlier this year, we've now added a fourth D, accelerating new restaurant development. I know you're all interested to hear more details on this one, and we look forward to sharing more today.
Before we look ahead at how we're reimagining our future and evolving Accelerating the Arches, I want to remind everybody on where we are today and how we got here. It's been four years since I stepped into the CEO role and three years since our last investor update. I want to acknowledge the contributions of those who have stepped up to make the story we're telling today possible. First, I'm grateful to my senior leadership team, whose talents and values-based leadership enable us to set our ambitions even higher. I'd also like to thank our board of directors, their expertise, dedication to McDonald's, all of that contributes to the strength of our system, and I'm grateful for their thoughtful counsel.
Finally, I'd like to recognize and thank the franchisees, suppliers, and employees whose passion and dedication is central to bringing the McDonald's experience to life for our customers each and every day. McDonald's unique three-legged stool continues to be the bedrock of our system. Despite a challenging and unpredictable operating environment, McDonald's has continued to deliver. In 2019, we reached $100 billion in system-wide sales. This year, we expect to reach nearly $130 billion in system-wide sales. I'll let you do the math on how many of our competitors' entire businesses it would take to add up to $30 billion worth of dollar growth in our system-wide sales, but spoiler alert, it is a lot. McDonald's unmatched size and scale gives us competitive advantages that no one else can match.
In our rapidly evolving industry, I believe that the benefits of scale will become only more pronounced. Scale matters and will matter a lot more. Every year, we buy over $50 billion of food, packaging, and services.... Our buying scale means that McDonald's has the lowest cost and best quality in the industry, enabling us to offer customers superior value at attractive margins for our franchisees. McDonald's invests over $4 billion every year marketing our brand, 3-4 times more than our nearest branded competitor. Our marketing scale ensures that our brand maintains high top-of-mind awareness, which drives customer affinity and frequency. With a $50 billion balance sheet and blue-chip credit rating, our financing scale means that McDonald's and our franchisees have the lowest borrowing costs in the industry.
This allows our system to maintain a modern restaurant estate while continuing to aggressively invest in growth opportunities. Today, there is no bigger growth opportunity than the one that we see in digital and technology. As all of you know, digital and tech are inherently a scale game. McDonald's superior scale means that we can build capabilities at a pace and cost that no one else in our industry can match. As more and more customers, literally hundreds of millions, join our digital ecosystem, our pricing tools get sharper, our AI models get smarter, our restaurants become easier to operate, and most importantly, the overall customer experience improves. The network effects from digital and tech are real, and they favor McDonald's. Together, these accumulated benefits of McDonald's superior scale allow us to offer compelling returns to investors and franchisees alike.
Beyond our incremental $30 billion of system-wide sales growth, there are several other strong signs of progress. We've gained share across most of our major markets. We're attracting and retaining top talent that are passionate about the McDonald's brand, and our restaurant teams are executing at a high level and customer satisfaction is increasing. Well, there have been many contributors to our success. I'd like to highlight two key decisions that we made that I think helped turbocharge our system. The first is that we modernized our company values and made our commitment to them as the backbone of our Accelerating the Arches business strategy. McDonald's has always been a values-driven company, but we lacked a common vocabulary, and as a result, while we all felt the company's values, we often didn't talk about the company's values.
Now, some of you might say that values aren't a real business driver. Not something you can put in a model, they're not something you can see, but I firmly believe we would not have navigated the last several years as effectively as we did without them. Whether in the ways that we showed up for our restaurant teams, local communities, and system throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, to the ways we stood by our people and communities through the periods of social unrest across the U.S., to how we approached and carried out the difficult decision to exit Russia. Without our values at the center. With our values at our center, we continue to broaden our impact in markets around the world across all three legs of the stool.
The second key decision we made was to put the right values-based leaders in the right structure to support our teams to become faster, more innovative, and more efficient. In 2021, I created the role of Chief Customer Officer to lead the new customer experience team. McDonald's is a true omni-channel business. We needed someone who could take an end-to-end look at the customer experience across both the physical and digital worlds. Today, you'll see some exciting new ideas that have come from this approach. There were other changes on my senior leadership team since our last investor update. I've sought to ensure that we maintain a good combination of longtime McDonald's talent along with external hires. I feel great about my senior team, and today you'll get to see them in action and ask questions, and I think you, too, will be impressed.
As we announced earlier this year, we made some meaningful changes to our structure and ways of working with our Accelerating the Organization initiative. We've removed layers between our people and the restaurants, enabling us to identify One McDonald's Way solutions that we are quickly scaling. With this new structure now firmly in place, I can confidently say that our organization is fit for purpose. As you've heard several times on our quarterly earnings call, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be part of the McDonald's system. Our McDonald's brand is one of the top 5 most valuable brands in the world, a globally recognized icon that is part of, and in some cases, defines culture. We've accumulated one of the largest branded restaurant footprints in our industry, with over 40,000 locations, giving us incomparable reach in the physical world.
In the digital world, our app is the gateway into the McDonald's experience. Across 50 of our largest markets, we have had over 100 million customer registrations on our mobile app during just the last 12 months, exceeding all other restaurant brands. We have built one of the largest loyalty programs in the world. Today, we have 150 million users that have been active in the last 90 days across our top 50 markets, with 70 million in China alone. This provides us with scalable data to serve each of our customers in unique and engaging ways. Our purpose-built technology has propelled this momentum. It represents a continuation of McDonald's heritage to reimagine the customer experience. This powerful triad of physical presence, digital ecosystem, and our brand has positioned us as a leader, and we're not done yet.
There is significant growth potential within our Accelerating the Arches strategy. Over the next few years, we'll continue to leverage our MCDs to drive continued growth.... Ray Kroc said, "When we are very much alive and growing, it's impossible to stand still." Today, we're excited to also share our longer-term ambitions. We'll talk about how our brand, together with our physical and digital competitive advantages, position us not only to extend our leadership in QSR, but more ambitiously, cement McDonald's position as one of the leading consumer-facing companies in the world, period. To support this ambition, we're introducing three new platforms, which will become part of our Accelerating the Arches strategy. The first is our consumer platform.
We are building one of the largest consumer platforms in the world that will bring together the best of our brand, physical, and digital competitive advantages to accelerate growth in our loyalty program and drive valuable loyalty customers to visit more frequently. The second platform is our restaurant platform. We're building the most productive restaurant operating platform that will enable our franchisees to run restaurants more efficiently, and will put the latest technology in the hands of our crew to make their jobs easier. The third platform is our company platform. We are building an operating chassis for McDonald's that will enable our people to move with speed and innovate in support of our customers and franchisees. While each of these platforms is distinct, they are highly integrated, enabled by our scalable data and digital capabilities.
As we look ahead to the next 5-10 years, we believe these platforms can create a step change in our sales and margin trajectory, slowly at first, but with increasing speed and impact. We are incredibly excited about the future of McDonald's. I am certain that by the end of our investor update, you will come away with 2 strong conclusions. 1, that McDonald's is poised to extend its leadership as the premier restaurant company in the world, while continuing our legacy of innovation. And 2, that our full long-term potential is best measured against the leading consumer-facing companies in the world. Full stop. We've organized our day as follows: in just a minute, I'll invite members of my senior leadership team to talk about the new opportunities to leverage our MCDs to drive market share outperformance around the world in the near term.
You'll hear about our continued efforts to lead with our values and positively impact the communities we serve. We'll then talk to you about our technology and how that will enable our plans, followed by a look at our financial outlook. After that, those of us in the building today will head to a series of rotations that go deeper on our opportunities for growth in the next few years. Following rotations, we'll pick up with all of you in the room and those watching on live stream to discuss the ways in which we're reimagining our longer-term future, and of course, we'll close with a Q&A. To get us started and speak more about how we will maximize our marketing, I'll now turn it over to Jill McDonald, our President of International Operated Markets. Jill?
Thank you, Chris, and it's great to be here today with all of you. As Chris mentioned, I am the president of our International Operated Market segment, which represents nearly 35% of McDonald's total system-wide sales, nearly 50% of revenues, and over 40% of operating income. The IOM segment spans 19 countries with over 10,000 restaurants, and it includes some of our largest markets: France, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany, as well as some smaller markets like the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Switzerland. Now, as some of you may know, I'm actually a McDonald's boomerang. Earlier in my career, I ran McDonald's UK business and was also president of Northern Europe. I returned to the company in September 2022, after serving as the CEO of Costa Coffee. I'm often asked, what's different about the McDonald's of today from the one I knew a decade ago?
A few things really stand out for me. First, I've been blown away by the strength of the talent that exists across the system, as well as within the senior leadership team you'll hear from today. Second, I'm reminded of the sheer size and scale of the McDonald's system, company, suppliers, and franchisees, which has only gotten stronger with time. Last is the company's refreshed approach to marketing. As a former CMO myself, I can tell you that McDonald's approach is far more rigorous and connected to culture than it has been in its history. Across the company, we now share the strong belief, backed by data, that great marketing creative drives outsized Comp Sales performance. It's been a big unlock, having the entire global organization rally behind the power of creativity and the importance of putting our brand in culture.
I'm excited to highlight the progress we've made over the last two years building a McDonald's brand, show you how that's driven business performance, and then outline why maximizing our marketing remains a meaningful growth opportunity. Let's start here. As you heard Chris say, McDonald's is one of the world's most recognized, most beloved brands. Now, it may not be new news that McDonald's is one of the world's most valuable brands, but the privilege of being a cultural icon decade after decade is certainly not inevitable, even for McDonald's. And there were days, not too long ago, when our creative had seemingly slid into focusing on short-term transactional promotions about what we were selling, to the exclusion of what people were feeling and the love they have for the brand... And we knew we could do better.
Bringing emotion back to our creative was the impetus for standing up McDonald's Creative Effectiveness Program. Its goal is to unify marketers and agencies in over 100 countries under a shared culture of feel-good marketing. Over the last several years, McDonald's has launched multiple campaigns in many markets. They connect our brand to customers and culture in really disruptive ways that have driven huge growth and momentum for the business, and the world took notice. The authentic and organic relationships we've built with customers around the world are driving remarkable engagement with the brand. And as a result, since 2019, we've quadrupled social media engagement across platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This simply would not have been possible in the McDonald's of yesterday. Before we talk about how we got here, let's take a look at how we've been engaging with fans around the world.
We've been shaking it up, haven't we? Cooking up deliciousness. Collabing and remixing. From legends to dream teams. Big screen to small screen. We're game-changing, smile making, driver training, groundbreaking. Going viral. Winning fans. Getting oohs and ahs. And raising the arches higher than ever. Because we've always been more than a restaurant. We're local culture, pop culture, global culture.
As you can see, McDonald's is elevating its marketing game. But while we're proud of our progress in markets like the U.S. and the U.K., if we're honest, we still have room to get even better. The quality of our marketing is still inconsistent across markets, and we have an opportunity to improve consistency of execution. To guide the continued evolution of our marketing model, we've developed a McDonald's marketing playbook, and the playbook has three key parts. First, establishing One McDonald's Way for creative excellence. Second, maximizing the returns on our marketing investment. And third, implementing a more personalized approach to value. One McDonald's Way for creative excellence starts with embedding a common language, tools, and measurement around creativity, so we all can objectively recognize and define what great looks like.
From there, we can build a culture of bold, creative, one that leans into the magic of our brand while taking big creative swings to drive cultural relevance and more meaningful connection with our fans all around the world. For example, we've created a consistent approach for identifying fan truths, like fighting for the last fry at the bottom of the bag, or licking the gooey Egg McMuffin cheese that sticks to the wrapper. We're tapping into those moments, memories, rituals, and behaviors that people have with our brand, while shining a light on what fans love about McDonald's. No other restaurant brand invokes these rituals and memories quite like McDonald's. Central to One McDonald's Way for creative excellence is our ability to share and scale world-class creative ideas quickly across markets, and to spot the ideas that can have global scale to help them grow.
We're now being more intentional about putting processes in place to set up singular ideas to drive massive global impact. For example, Raise Your Arches was originally developed in our U.K. market. It rooted in the fan truth that an invitation to grab a McDonald's is so universal, it can be extended without words. Just raise your eyebrows, which actually is harder to do than it actually looks. The global truth behind the work immediately sparked interest when our U.K. CMO shared it across the global marketing community. But curiosity alone isn't enough for fellow CMOs to commit. Objective testing and a common framework for analyzing success is what sealed the deal to prove that this simple gesture would resonate across borders. Quickly, we brought the campaign to more than 35 markets around the world, and we also adapted versions for the Middle East, Asia, Italy, and more.
This represents One McDonald's Way for sharing and scaling at its best. Critical acclaim followed as Raise Your Arches was awarded with advertising prestigious Cannes Lion. The same goes for Famous Orders. It started as one bold, culturally relevant idea in the U.S., and it has since traveled the globe with markets localizing to feature their favorite talent, from Kid Laroi in Australia to our global famous order featuring BTS. The singular idea that everyone has a go-to McDonald's order has been scaled across the system, whilst putting the brand at the center of our marketing. The second chapter of our McDonald's marketing playbook includes an intentional focus on return on marketing investment. We've introduced new testing methodologies to objectively measure and assess the impact of our creative.
In the U.S., this has already shown strong correlation to business outcomes, far surpassing any of the tools that we've used in the past. This is helping our marketers learn much more quickly what works for McDonald's, so that they can drive an even higher ROI every single time. The final way that we're maximizing our marketing is through a more personalized approach to value. McDonald's has always stood for great value, and today our customers rate us as the number one brand in QSR on both value for money and affordability in our top markets. Despite significant inflation over the past two years, our approach to strategic menu pricing, the strength of the McDonald's brand, and the overall value proposition we provide, enables our ability to evolve our pricing structure and maintain our value leadership position.
We also recognize that the meaning of right price and value varies by customers. Some are more price-sensitive than others, and there has long been an opportunity for McDonald's to get more targeted in its pricing. Over the last several years, we've significantly improved our pricing capabilities, building a talented internal team, along with a suite of proprietary pricing tools, and creating what we believe is a competitive advantage for the company. With a strategy rooted in customer behaviors and insights, we're evaluating the pricing opportunity at an individual restaurant and menu item level, optimizing price and limiting customer resistance. When we follow our pricing tools, our ability to price at a level that the consumer will accept is significantly better than when we don't, which maximizes the flow-through rate of our price increases to sales.
Franchisees see the value in this, and adoption rates for our pricing strategy are high. As we continue to learn more about our loyalty customers, gathering data on how they visit us and what they buy, we'll leverage machine learning at scale and get even smarter with our pricing methodology. This will enable us to personalize with even greater precision by looking at thousands of customer cohorts, where we used to have less than 10. We plan to make our digital offers even more targeted, meaning discounting is less broad-based and more personalized, with a greater expected return on the investment in discounting. So taken all together, this is the future of McDonald's value. Central to our customers' love of the brand is our food, and in particular, our core menu.
To tell you more about how we're making our fans' favorites even more enticing, I'll now turn it over to the President of our International Developmental Licensed Markets segment, Jo Sempels. Thank you.
Thank you, Jill. I'm delighted to be here with all of you today, and I'm going to talk with you about our second growth pillar, the C in our MCDs, our delicious core menu. Now, before I do that, let me give you a quick overview of our IDL business. The segment is comprised of a diverse group of markets owned by more than 48 developmental licensees. It has a footprint covering nearly 65% of global population and representing over 40% of our global estate. IDL accounts for around 25% of McDonald's total system-wide sales, roughly 10% of revenues, and nearly 15% of operating income. We have been the unit growth engine of the system. We are currently opening about 1,500 restaurants per year, and to put that in perspective, that's roughly 80% of our global openings.
Now, around the world in our IDL markets, we also have hundreds of local favorite menu items. They are designed to provide new experience for our customers, play on regional flavors, and meet the tastes and expectations of our fans right where they are. Now, whether it's the McAloo Tikkii burger in India, the McFalafel in Egypt, or the Spicy McWings in China, yes, I am the lucky person who can say I have tried them all. So I also must say, they are truly delicious. Now, obviously, while these prominent favorites are critical to our brand's local relevance, the heart of McDonald's global appeal is our core menu. In 2022, these hugely popular core equities made up more than $75 billion in system-wide sales across the globe, which is nearly 65%. And our core menu has grown significantly over the past few years.
We've added over $13 billion of additional system-wide sales since 2019, and are growing at about 7% per year. Now, what's more? Our core menu has grown over twice as fast as the rest of our menu, and that is the power of these fan favorites. Now, one thing you'll notice about the McDonald's menu, we don't just sell products, we sell brands. In fact, McDonald's menu now features an incredible 17 billion-dollar brands, rivaling the world's largest consumer companies. Now, most of these billion-dollar brands are on our core menu, as you can imagine. This includes global brand icons like the McMuffin, the McFlurry, Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Big Mac, Chicken McNuggets, and of course, our world-famous French fries, just to name a few....
These brands have superior pricing power above any other, and because for our consumers, there is no comparable situation and no comparable substitute. This also means they drive greater profitability. What's more, our core menu items are significantly more efficient for our entire system. That is from the start of our supply chain all the way through the prep line for our crew. Through our Accelerating the Arches strategy, we made a conscious commitment to our core menu to further elevate these billion-dollar equities and create even greater brand relevance for our customers. We focused on our media investment, improved restaurant execution, enhanced quality and taste of our core favorites, and got more nimble on innovation. We've introduced new equities and line extensions to create added fanfare and to give our customers new reasons to revisit their favorites. These changes are clearly resonating with our customers.
They're driving significant increases in perception scores, and since 2019, more of our customers are now saying, "Great-tasting food and great quality food." And these are the two most important drivers of customer visits at McDonald's. And we continue to see even more potential with our core beef, chicken, and coffee brands. In beef, we've maintained our market leadership over the past few years and grew our share of IEO servings. But as usual, we're not resting on our past success. With initiatives like Best Burger, we're making small changes that are adding up to big differences that our customers are really noticing. By the end of this year, we expect Best Burger to be in 70 markets across the globe, and by the end of 2026, we expect it to be deployed in nearly all of our markets.
In addition to Best Burger, we've also identified an unmet customer need with a significant opportunity to drive future growth in beef, and that is the large beef burger category. We've listened to our customers, and we understand their desire for larger, high-quality burgers that fill you up and are delivered in a convenient and affordable way, the quintessential McDonald's way. And of course, we're taking a One McDonald's Way approach to this innovation. Our goal is to solve this problem once, test and learn in a few markets first, and then quickly scale across the globe. Now, if that approach sounds familiar to you, it's because we followed exactly the same playbook with the launch of our McCrispy chicken sandwich.
It started as an unmet demand, an unmet customer need for a globally consistent, high-quality, large chicken sandwich, and since then, has quickly evolved to a billion-dollar brand across more than 30 markets, driving additional sales for us. Globally, the chicken category is nearly twice the size of beef and growing faster. When we launched Accelerating the Arches in 2020, we were really intentional about putting chicken at the heart of our growth strategy. Since then, we've made, we've made tremendous progress in chicken. Chicken now represents $25 billion dollar in annual system-wide sales, which is actually on par with our beef business. Now, with four chicken equities that are billion-dollar brands in their own right, we have made impressive strides against our goal of developing a reputation for great chicken, and that success is fueling even higher ambitions.
By the end of 2025, we plan to further expand our McCrispy equity to nearly all markets around the world, and we've also identified an opportunity to broaden our McCrispy offering into wraps and tenders, and with these new offerings, we see the potential to add another point of chicken share by 2026. You'll hear more about this later in the rotation, this afternoon. Now, finally, we'll continue to bring excitement to our sizable Chicken McNugget business, a core equity with more than $10 billion in annual system-wide sales, and a business that has also grown more than 10% annually since 2019. Thanks to a stronger core marketing focus, successful line extensions like Spicy McNuggets and, of course, exciting sauce innovation.
So we've touched on our leadership in beef, we've highlighted our growing share in chicken, now let's dive into the last of our core menu focus areas, which is coffee. As you know, coffee is a very attractive category. It is large, highly profitable, growing quickly, and obviously with strong habitual behavior. 30 years ago, we have launched McCafé in Melbourne, Australia. Since then, we've built a sizable coffee business, and we now sell nearly 8 million cups of coffee per day. And that makes McDonald's obviously the number two coffee player globally. Now, while we've had success with our McCafé business across the globe, in markets like Australia, Canada, the U.K., and Middle East, we still haven't realized our full global potential.
Our customers already trust us to deliver hot, fresh, and delicious food, and that trust grants us the opportunity to deliver exactly the same through McCafé. However, over the last 30 years, our business has been highly fragmented in our coffee area. It has led us to create disparate solutions within each market. Now, with our global footprint, leading breakfast share, and strong value credentials, we can grow our coffee business by offering the promise of a delicious, high-quality coffee product at an affordable price, delivered with the speed and consistency of McDonald's. By leading with food and addressing known gaps in consistency across markets, we firmly believe we'll create a winning formula that will set us up to accelerate coffee share moving forward. We'll do that by adopting a One McDonald's Way approach for McCafé around the world, more effectively using our scale advantages.
First and foremost, we'll establish McCafé as part of our core menu offering and as our only brand for coffee at McDonald's. Next, we plan to address the inconsistency in availability, experience, and taste across the system by reducing the use of over a hundred types of equipment for coffee to a smaller list of only five global suppliers. This will ensure gold standard execution around the world while still giving markets the flexibility to address local tastes and preferences. And finally, of course, we'll also address the growing space of cold coffee. We're developing a plan on how to best adapt and execute against cold coffee beverages. And that plan will provide convenience, value, and high quality taste, synonymous with McDonald's, to our customers across all markets across the globe.
Now, as you understand, while we're giving our customers even more reasons to visit McDonald's, we're also going to make it easier for them to get their favorites. Now, to take us through the details of our third growth driver, the Ds in MCD, let me turn it over to President of McDonald's USA, Joe Erlinger. Thank you.
Thanks, Jo, and good morning, everyone. It's my great pleasure to update you on the three Ds of drive-thru, delivery, and digital that we introduced as part of the Accelerating the Arches in 2020. And then I'll be joined later by Manu Steijaert, who will take you through our fourth D, development, that we introduced in early 2023 as an enhancement to that strategy. Within our four Ds, we're taking the things our customers love about McDonald's, from convenience, to value, to personal connections with our brand, and making them even better. That's certainly the story in the US. Now, I know you're all quite familiar with our US business, but I want to highlight why this segment is so well-positioned to continue taking market share.
Our strong performance over the past few years is the result of many strategic, long-term decisions, and not because of any one action we took during a four-week marketing window or single quarter. Since the last time we met, we now have a fully modernized restaurant estate, a simplified menu that focuses on our core, and a significantly larger digital and delivery business. We're also continuing to focus on the fundamentals of delivering an outstanding and seamless customer and crew experience with a commitment to our world-famous standards of excellence. This past year, that excellence took another step forward with the U.S. launch of our global performance and customer excellence initiative, known as Operations PACE . Operations PACE , the restaurant grading and performance consulting program. It's designed to uphold McDonald's standards and ensure that customers enjoy the best possible service every single day.
Since implementation, we've made significant operational enhancements and continue to see improved customer satisfaction scores. We have room to do even better. We know there's a strong correlation between high levels of operational performance and increased sales and guest count growth. In fact, there's almost a 5-point gap in the top-line performance between the restaurants with the highest and the lowest operation scores. Now, I've worked in many places around the world and can tell you that every market has a similar gap to close. This is a big opportunity. Beyond our work improving restaurant operations, we've also made updates to our franchising terms. While the franchising decisions were difficult ones, we believe we're now going to be able to elevate performance and position ourselves for long-term growth with the industry's best franchisees.
All the individual changes we've made to the McDonald's U.S. business are having a multiplier effect. In fact, we anticipate the U.S. business will surpass $50 billion in system-wide sales this year, growing more than 30% when compared to 2019. So that's the big picture on the U.S. business. Now let's look a little more closely at each of our three Ds, starting with the first D, drive-thru. McDonald's invented the drive-thru, and we've been refining it for the last 50 years, since we opened our very first one in Sierra Vista, Arizona. We know better than anyone what drive-thru customers care about. We've been a first mover in locking down the best locations, the majority of which we own, at very attractive prices. That gives us a long-term structural advantage, and we really saw that play out during the pandemic.
Drive-thru became a huge competitive advantage that could not be replicated quickly or at scale by anyone else. We are by far the largest drive-thru player in the world, with more than 27,000 drive-thru locations, providing unmatched scale and convenience. We see big opportunities to improve speed, capacity, and order accuracy, all of which are highly correlated to guest count growth. A significant lever for growth is improving the physical layout of the drive-thru, which can increase both speed and capacity. In your basic drive-thru lane, which I'm sure you all know, there's one lane. The customer orders, proceeds to the first window to pay, and then picks up their food at the second window. It's the classic layout… But it has multiple potential bottlenecks that can really slow us down.
What we found is that we can reduce pain points by adding a second lane for order taking and a third window where we can park customers with more complicated orders. In the U.S., over 70% of drive-thrus have dual lanes, and many of those also have a third window. In our International Operated Markets segment, though, the number of restaurants with dual lanes and a third window is lower, even as we see more customers shifting to use drive-thru in places like Western Europe. Let's take Germany as an example. In Germany today, just about 4% of our restaurants have a second drive-thru lane. Over the next years, the market will expand this capability to more than half of their restaurant footprint.
So not only do we believe that these enhancements can make the drive-thru quicker and more efficient, we know that this will add more transactions. As our franchisees know well, drive-thru enhancements are some of the highest returning capital investments that are available to them. For drive-thru to work best for customers, it also needs to work for our crew, and that's where our Chief Restaurant Officers come in. These are new roles that we created as part of our Accelerating the Organization initiative. Our Chief Restaurant Officers are working through strategies to enhance staffing models that improve both speed and accuracy while reducing complexity for our crew and increasing convenience for our customers. While the drive-thru will continue to be a competitive differentiator, we're also making it easier for customers to get their favorite McDonald's orders from their couch or the office, or even the soccer field.
Which brings me to our second D, delivery. At this very moment, there are approximately 55,000 McDelivery orders being prepared or on their way to customers around the world. At our last in-person investor update in 2017, we had a delivery presence in Asia, and we had just begun testing delivery in a couple of 100 restaurants in the US. At that point, delivery represented about $1 billion in annual global system-wide sales. Today, that figure has grown to more than $16 billion. McDonald's is now number one in QSR delivery orders around the world, and we continue to grow share faster than our competitors. We are confident that we will continue to see share growth in delivery because we believe we have structural advantages that none of our competitors can match. We think there's three of them, to be specific.
One, with over 40,000 locations and growing, we are closer to customers than any other brand. That allows us to deliver food to our customers faster, and faster also means hotter. Two, because of our industry-leading delivery volumes, we attract more drivers or couriers to our restaurants, which means better driver availability. And three, we've negotiated better rates with our third-party ordering providers. That means we can offer lower prices when compared to products from our competitors. Our U.S. market has set a new delivery sales record every year since 2017. That is a powerful example of the results that our structural advantages produce. Even as industry traffic in the U.S. was flat to negative in the first half of 2023, our delivery guest counts grew over 15%. And the next frontier for delivery is integrated delivery.
That is a feature that allows customers to seamlessly order within the McDonald's app while enjoying all the benefits of our loyalty program. With integrated delivery orders, we're able to capture customer data within our digital ecosystem, enabling us to provide more personalized experiences. Today, this feature is available in our 5 top markets, and we intend to expand to all other markets. By 2027, we expect that 30% of our delivery orders will come through integrated delivery. Our confidence in driving the growth of integrated delivery comes from our overwhelming success in driving digital adoption. It also comes from the many ways we are making the McDonald's experience better and more convenient for our loyalty customers. Which brings us directly to our third D, digital.
As we've scaled our loyalty program, we've increased customer adoption of our global mobile app by delivering additional value to our customers. Over the last three years, our active loyalty user base has grown from millions to tens of millions of active users across our top six markets alone. But we've grown our loyalty program well beyond our top six markets to more than 50 of our markets around the world. As you heard from Chris earlier, with 150 million active users across those markets, we now have the largest loyalty program in the restaurant industry and one of the largest in the world in any industry. This bears repeating, in any industry. In fact, our loyalty system-wide sales have more than tripled in the last three years to over $20 billion.
By keeping our customers at the heart of our digital strategy, by delivering value, however, and whenever they decide to order and enjoy their McDonald's favorites, we expect to grow our active loyalty user base to 250 million by 2027. And by deepening our relationships with these customers, we'll build further engagement and expect to more than double our annual loyalty sales to $45 billion. Now, historically, the number of our locations was our competitive advantage at McDonald's.... In the future, data will sit alongside restaurant locations as another significant competitive advantage. It will fuel a virtuous cycle of improvements to the customer experience. And as you heard from Jill earlier today, loyalty provides us with the data to serve customers in a personalized and uniquely McDonald's way.
Even as we're just starting to build out our personalization capabilities, we're already seeing loyalty customers in the U.S. visit with 15% greater frequency, and in markets like the U.S. and Canada, spend nearly twice as much on average as non-loyalty customers. Looking forward, we'll continue to build a digital ecosystem and enhance our ability to more deeply connect with our customers throughout their McDonald's journey, from personalized offers to discovering our latest menu additions, from loyalty members, access to, exclusive swag, to McDonald's only gamified experiences or exclusive media content. Of course, as a restaurant business, delivering fast, accurate, hot, and delicious food will sit at the heart of every experience. Of all our ordering channels, mobile ordering is the fastest growing with our customers. We saw hundreds of millions of mobile orders in the third quarter of this year.
To that objective, earlier this year, we launched Ready On Arrival, or ROA, in the United States. ROA integrates geofencing technology into our mobile app. geofencing notifies the restaurant when customers are approaching and prompts the crew to start preparing the order. It allows for more efficient and effective restaurant operations, getting our customers the food they love while reducing customer wait times. In fact, we've seen a 60-second reduction in wait times for customers that pick up via curbside or in the restaurant. As a result of delivering hotter, fresher food to our customers, we've seen significantly higher customer satisfaction score in these transactions, which we know in turn, drives frequency.
As we deploy ROA technology across our top 6 markets over the next 18 months, we expect continued growth of mobile ordering will drive loyalty, adoption, and order frequency, and help deliver on the loyalty growth ambition I spoke about just moments ago. So I can sum up why we are so confident with just a few simple words: drive-thru, delivery, and digital. And now to talk about that fourth D, development, let me turn it over to Global Chief Customer Officer, Manu Steijaert. Thank you.
Thanks, Joe. As the Global Chief Customer Officer, I'm responsible for how we optimize the customer experience across both the physical and digital worlds. This is a responsibility that is near and dear to my heart, because my McDonald's story began in 1978 when my parents became franchisees in Belgium. At the age of 16, I worked in their restaurants as a crew member. I joined the company in 2001, also in Belgium, and have held several roles across the Netherlands, France, and our International Operated Markets segment. Whether working in my parents' restaurants or in corporate roles, the same rule applies. There is only one way to grow a business sustainably, and that is customer by customer. No matter how the customer chooses to order, our ability to serve them with the convenience they expect relies on our physical locations.
The three Ds that Joe outlined have been central to bringing in more customers, more often. So much so that demand is outpacing the capacity of our existing restaurants. That's what makes me so excited to talk about our fourth D, development. Over the last decade, McDonald's has added about 5,000 restaurants system-wide, and that's an impressive number. As you start to look closer, you'll see that many of our new units were in markets like China and Brazil. We focused on building new units in our ideal markets while modernizing our existing units in our own markets across the U.S. and IOM. It actually enabled us to enhance customer experience, improve our speed of service, and grow average unit volumes significantly. Now, we've learned over the years that it's best to grow our footprint from a position of strength.
I think you'd all agree, our strong performance, our fully modernized estate, have actually earned us the right to expand our footprint in the US and IOM in a way we've never have before. At the same time, there remains a significant opportunity in our IDL segment, which we will continue to work with our partners to expand in those markets as well. Now, with our current size and scale, some in this room might be questioning whether there is truly more space to grow. I'm here to tell you, we see an incredible opportunity to grow the business by building more locations, getting us even closer to our customers. Over the past year, we've been on a journey to evaluate the opportunity, and we have taken a market-level, rigorous, and data-driven approach to power our entire development strategy in the US and IOM.
So we're assessing the landscape from the top down and the bottom up, complementing high-level population forecasting with a hyperlocal understanding of customer demand and access to world-class tools and data. So for example, in our U.S. markets, our store counts have grown much slower than the population in the fastest growing areas of the country. We do have a significant opportunity to rightsize that ratio, and you'll hear and see a lot more about this work and where we see our greatest opportunities in our development rotation a bit later. So what does this all translate to? Today, we have over 40,000 restaurants across the globe. Over the past four years, we've added nearly $30 billion in system-wide sales to that same footprint. And by the end of 2027, we will expand our footprint to 50,000 McDonald's restaurants across the world.
That will drive growth in system-wide sales with strong contributions to the bottom line as we open more restaurants across the U.S. and IOM. To put our development ambition into perspective, this period of restaurant expansion will be the fastest growth in the history of McDonald's. So let me walk you through the numbers for context. It actually took us 33 years to reach our first 10,000 restaurants. It took us 8 years to reach 20,000 restaurants. It took us 7 years to reach 30,000 restaurants, and we actually reached 40,000 restaurants after 18 years in 2021. By the end of 2027, 4 years from now, we expect to reach 50,000 restaurants.
I'll even give more details on our development targets a little later, but hopefully you can feel the confidence we have in McDonald's development potential over the next four years and beyond. Moving forward, across the four Ds, we will use our size and scale for the greatest impact. That's the power of the McDonald's system, and it's critical to driving future growth. But of course, for customers, how we grow is as important as where we grow. So here to talk about the work we're doing around the world to advance sustainability and build brand trust is our Global Chief Impact Officer, Jon Banner .
Thanks, Manu, and good morning, everyone. In my role, I have the privilege of guiding how communications, sustainability, government relations, public policy, and Ronald McDonald House Charities come together to support responsible and sustainable business growth. When Accelerating the Arches was launched in 2020, we said there were two powerful truths coming into focus. The first was that the needs of our increasingly digital consumers were changing. The second was that people were expecting more from corporations today, and that customers were more likely to choose brands that were a force for good in the world. As Chris said then, none of us have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines anymore. That changing expectation meant embracing a bigger, more holistic vision, one that put our values and our purpose to feed and foster community at the very center of our growth strategy.
Three years later, as our communities and supply chains continue to experience unprecedented pressures, our values and purpose have been essential to our work to grow sustainably, drive trust, and maintain our position of strength. Our customers have noticed. Our brand trust score, which is the measure of whether customers can count on us to do what we say, has risen, and that is an invitation to build on our progress. Together with our system partners, we're focused on growing more responsibly and more sustainably. We are investing in environmental and social actions that improve the long-term resiliency of our supply chains and restaurant operations. Our actions are guided by our updated Net Zero target. That target was recently validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. Let me now share a few examples of environmental actions we're taking to safeguard our business.
The first centers around our work to tackle climate change and transform our food system. For decades, we've been industry leaders in sustainable sourcing and promoting sustainable agriculture, and we continue to lead through action and advocacy as the global landscape evolves. After all, our core menu and the strength of it depends on... To protect and enhance critical supply chains, we are working with suppliers, farmers, and scientific advisors to implement regenerative agriculture practices. In tandem, through our work with the Sustainable Markets Initiative, we are developing a financial blueprint for farmers to de-risk the financial burden as they transition to regenerative farming. Trials to implement this blueprint will soon begin in the UK in partnership with one of our suppliers, McCain Foods. To further this work, we're using our influence to advocate for frameworks that support farming and ranching communities' ongoing efforts to sequester carbon.
Undoubtedly, the transformation of our food system depends on collaboration. Here in the U.S., one way that comes to life is through our work with Cargill, the Walmart Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund. Together, we are supporting cattle ranchers across the Northern Great Plains in their efforts to embrace regenerative agriculture. Through technical expertise, training, and tools, this program is making an impact across 80 ranches and about 800,000 acres of grasslands. Secondly, we're increasing access to and the use of renewable energy around the world. Since 2019, McDonald's has signed 14 virtual power purchase agreements in the U.S. We've added new large-scale renewable energy to the grid that builds on significant sourcing efforts in our European markets. Additionally, we're building prototypes to embed energy-efficient equipment and sustainable materials into our design features. In fact, our newest design, restaurant design, is focused on overall decor circularity.
It will debut later this month in France, and through it, we hope to learn how to get more responsible materials into more restaurants faster and more affordably over time. Lastly, we've been highly focused on sustainable packaging solutions for years. Today, more than 80% of our primary guest packaging comes from renewable, recycled, or certified sustainable sources. In regions such as Europe, that reaches close to 95%. Our ambition is that the packaging materials we use remain part of the circular economy, rather than becoming waste. We are working on this in a variety of ways across the business. Poland is a recent success story. There, we've had a two-year campaign to increase recycling in our restaurants, and it's produced incredible results. It's making customers more willing to segregate their trash while building awareness for ways we care about the environment.
Let me bring this to life by sharing a video from Poland's campaign, and it'll include subtitles for clarity. You've heard a lot today about the power of our brand. We can even make circularity fun. By aligning our long-term business strategy and impact strategies, we are ensuring that our business and our partners have the resilience not just to survive, but to thrive in the face of change over the decades to come. We will continue to bring greater visibility, sustainability, and accountability across everything we do. Ultimately, McDonald's will be remembered not just for whether we grew, but for how we grew and how we served. I'd like to now hand it off to our Global Chief Information Officer, Brian Rice, who will discuss our technology strategy, another area that touches every part of our business.
Thanks, Jon, and good morning. You've heard a lot today about the impact technology will have on every aspect of our business moving forward. It's extremely exciting, but the reality is somebody actually has to build it, and that's me and my organization. This is my third CIO role, and I'm often asked to compare my experience as CIO at McDonald's to other companies where I've worked. The thing that has stood out to me the most is our scale. The combination of the power of our brand, our expansive global footprint, and our customer reach uniquely positions us for many things. I believe one of those things is our ability to leverage our scale to drive significant value through technology, much more than any of our competitors are able.
While Accelerating the Arches is working, we're not yet leveraging the full potential of technology, nor are we leveraging the full potential of our scale. At least not yet, but soon we will. McDonald's significant global expansion over the years was fueled by a decentralized model. As we grew, our technology became more fragmented, and as a result, our current landscape is very complex. We have an inconsistent digital experience and hundreds of different systems to manage. As the world changes, we know how important it is to more quickly anticipate our customer needs and expectations. By priding ourselves in meeting our customers where they are, even before they get there, we will continue to be a leader in the industry. You heard Chris share earlier that McDonald's is building three new platforms: one for customers, one for restaurants, and one for the company.
Together, these platforms will enable us to execute against our MCDs in a world that is increasingly digital. So what does the future of technology look like for McDonald's, and how is technology supporting the ambitions that we've outlined today? Central to our strategy is marrying our greatest strength, our scale, to the power of technology to unlock speed and efficiency and power these three new platforms. We are calling this strategy Digitizing the Arches.... What will Digitizing the Arches mean for our customers? To deliver at the speed that our customers expect, we must address key technology challenges, including a fragmented digital experience. To do that, as part of Digitizing the Arches , we are advancing what is already one of the largest consumer platforms in the world.
This will be a consistent platform to engage our fans, from our mobile app, to our loyalty program, to web-based ordering, to our kiosk and beyond. With a consistent approach, we will be able to deploy innovations with much greater speed and agility. Let's take Ready On Arrival as an example of proven technology innovation that Joe mentioned earlier. The reason it will take several months to deploy this to our top six markets is a result of the different market versions of our technology. If we had a consistent digital experience in place today, we would be able to make a single version of Ready On Arrival available to all markets at the same time. This is an example of leveraging our scale. What's more, this solution will enable us to provide customers with a more reliable and familiar experience, regardless of where they go or how they order.
Today, we have different versions of our mobile app within each of our large markets that can't be used across borders. In the future, customers will no longer have to download a new app if they're traveling between countries, say, from France to the U.K. And this afternoon, Morgan will share more about how technology will enable our consumer platform, unlocking even more possibilities to grow our business. Customer expectations of brands continue to evolve in both the digital and physical worlds, and that also impacts how we run restaurants. Today, our restaurant infrastructure is out of sync with our digital future, which can contribute to reliability and stability issues. As part of Digitizing the Arches, we are announcing today a significant partnership with Google to build the most sophisticated and productive restaurant technology platform in the industry.
This will equip restaurant teams with advanced technology to deliver amazing hospitality to customers. As part of the partnership, we will extend Google Cloud through Edge Computing into our restaurants in over 100 markets around the world. This is a pioneering initiative that will not only improve stability and help us bring innovation to our restaurants more quickly, but it will enable several important new use cases. For example, as part of our restaurant platform, we are developing a new connected restaurant capability that Internet of Things-enabled restaurant equipment will plug into. Think of it as a data highway for our restaurants. This new capability will provide end-to-end visibility of how each of our restaurants are performing, which will unlock cost savings opportunities, improve food quality, and enhance our customer and crew experience, and it's also expected to increase restaurant uptime.
Extending the cloud into our restaurants will also accelerate the use of generative AI into our restaurants. As you may know, McDonald's has been an early adopter and pioneer in the use of AI. For example, voice ordering is deployed in nearly 100 drive-thrus across the U.S. Through our pilot, we have now tuned the models to provide a high degree of order accuracy, which is driving benefits, including a more consistent customer experience and reducing complexity for our crew. As we continue to gather learnings from our pilot restaurants, we expect to make a decision on the expansion opportunity by the end of 2024. But we've only just gotten started. We believe Gen AI offers another opportunity for McDonald's to build structural competitive advantage by leveraging our scale. The more data you feed Gen AI models, the better they become.
With a larger scale, Gen AI is exposed to more diverse information, and this diversity allows models to understand a broader range of patterns and nuances, enabling them to make more informed decisions. Our scale, again, gives us a unique advantage. We are very excited about the future of Gen AI, and we have several other interesting use cases in process already. And Manu will talk in more detail this afternoon about the benefits that our new restaurant operations platform will unlock for our restaurant teams in serving our customers. Lastly, the third platform within Digitizing the Arches is our company platform. This platform will enable our Global Business Services vision of transforming how we work as a company and franchisor, including modernizing technologies at all levels of the organization, and Skye will share more on that vision this afternoon as well.
At our core, our business is about making delicious, feel-good moments easy for everyone. Big picture, our ambition through Digitizing the Arches is to create the systems and tools that enable our consumer, restaurant, and company platforms, and make it easier for restaurant teams, franchisees, and supplier partners to deliver the McDonald's experience to customers. Let me now hand it over to our CFO, Ian Borden, who will bring all of this together from a financial perspective. Ian?
Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As many of you know, I stepped into the CFO role a little over a year ago, after nearly 30 years with the company, including 25 years of living and working around the world in market, segment, and international leadership roles. Through those 30 years, and in, in particular, in my last role as the president of our international business, I've witnessed firsthand how powerful it can be when we combine the scale of the McDonald's system with a clear strategic plan and a laser focus on exceptional execution. I had the privilege of overseeing the implementation of our Accelerating the Arches strategy in all of our markets outside of the U.S., and I'm proud to say that I've never witnessed more alignment across our system on a common vision.
I'm excited and fully confident about the next, what's next, and the growth opportunities that lie ahead across our M, C., and Ds, the details of which you've heard from others this morning. Well, there's a lot to be proud of as we look at our results over the last few years. It takes visionary leadership to further elevate performance from a position of strength. So now I'll take you through how we're continuing to invest in our business to drive long-term sustainable growth. But before I get there, let me take a minute to ground us. Over the past decade, we've evolved our business model significantly, growing from about 80% franchised in 2013 to about 95% franchised today.
We've structured our business in a way that enables us to allocate the majority of our time and resources to the areas of the business with the greatest stability, returns, and opportunity for growth. That has resulted in a more durable business model that yields a consistently strong and growing TSR algorithm. Over the past few years, our business has grown significantly, despite the challenging operating environment and our decision to exit Russia. It's actually quite remarkable when you step back and take a look at the numbers. As you heard Chris mention earlier today, by the end of this year, our system-wide sales will have grown $30 billion since 2019. Total margin dollars have grown significantly during that time, with roughly 90% of our restaurant margin dollars now coming through our franchise margins.
We've strengthened the efficiency of our operating business and grown our operating margin from just over 43% in 2019 to about 47% in 2023. Through all of this, we've provided significant shareholder value by delivering consistently strong shareholder return. We expect that our cash return to shareholders from the end of 2019 through 2023 will be $25 billion through the combination of dividends and share repurchase, despite pausing our share repurchase program during COVID. Looking at our results over the past few years, it's clear that our Accelerating the Arches strategy has delivered exceptional results. As you've heard from other members of the team this morning, we are confident that this is the right playbook for our business looking forward.
We believe our competitive strengths across the M, C, and Ds, and our ability to continue to identify new platforms for growth, put us in the best possible position to maximize the opportunities in our strategic plan for years to come. In addition to having a clear strategic vision and consistent execution, another factor critical to driving long-term success is our ability to make the right forward-looking investments. To that end, I want to address three critical areas of investment with you today and discuss how they translate into our financial outlook for the next few years. These three areas are new restaurant openings, technology and digital, and our global business services organization and capabilities. As you heard from Manu earlier this morning, we expect new unit development to be a more meaningful driver of growth moving forward.
That's why we've added it as our fourth D within the Accelerating the Arches strategy. Over the last several years, we have invested the majority of our capital to fully modernize our asset base across our own markets, including nearly $10 billion of system investment to modernize our restaurants in the U.S. This fully modernized estate has created additional demand within our restaurants. It has contributed to significant growth in average sales volume, and it will continue to be a structural advantage for us moving forward. With that now behind us, and with the current strength of our business, we believe we're in a unique position to accelerate new unit openings. Manu mentioned that we anticipate growing our total restaurant footprint to 50,000 restaurants by 2027.
That equates to accelerating our pace of openings to just over 4% unit growth in 2024 and further ramping up to about 5% by 2027. This will include opening significantly more restaurants in our own markets, all of which will be at a royalty rate of 5% and against which we will allocate more of our capital. This will drive greater top-line growth and overall financial contribution throughout our P&L, and will create a compelling value proposition, both for our franchisees and for the company in the US and IOM. Let me break down how we expect to reach 50,000 restaurants by segment. By the end of 2027, we plan to open about 900 restaurants in the US and about 1,900 restaurants across our IOM markets.
This will achieve a 2027 run rate of about 1,000 gross openings per year in the U.S. and IOM combined. We expect capital expenditures to gradually increase over time, with slightly higher investment in 2024 when compared to 2023. Beyond 2024, we expect annual increases in capital expenditures of about $300 million-$500 million until we achieve our 2027 run rate, with more of our capital being allocated to new restaurants each year as we move forward. We expect our developmental licensees will also continue to contribute significantly to our overall growth aspirations. We'll open about 7,000 new restaurants in IDL by 2027, with over half of these planned openings in China.
Our recent announcement to acquire Carlyle's 28% stake in McDonald's China enables McDonald's to further benefit from the long-term growth potential in our second-largest and fastest-growing market. The 50,000 restaurant target results in higher system-wide sales contribution from expansion, with a slight uptick in 2024 to nearly 2% and beyond 2024 at about 2.5% growth. Beyond development, we'll continue to look to invest in areas that deliver against customer needs, as well as unlock efficiencies and capabilities for our people and our resources. It's clear that we have the financial strength as a system to be able to make these investments and also continue to generate substantial free cash flow. For example, investments in technology and digital, as Brian just discussed, will create a consistent experience across the globe for both customers and crew, improving stability, efficiency, and unlocking capability.
Global Business Services, or GBS, will enable us to scale solutions with speed and agility as we unlock further capabilities for our people and resources. With time, we'll run the business more efficiently by modernizing our systems and tools. We will build richer and more agile data and insight capabilities to make our teams more effective, and ultimately, we will free up resources to invest in the growth areas that the team walked you through this morning. You'll hear more about GBS this afternoon from Skye Anderson. As I've mentioned before, our strong underlying business momentum and overall financial strength put us in the ideal position to invest in areas that will drive long-term efficiencies for our people and for our stakeholders.
Similar to 2023, we expect 2024 G&A as a percentage of system-wide sales to be about 2.2%, which includes our investments in technology, digital, and GBS. We ultimately measure our financial efficiency by our operating margin, as it serves as the most comprehensive gauge of our overall operating performance, and we will continue to focus on driving efficiencies over the longer term. As I mentioned earlier, we've made great progress in creating leverage in our adjusted operating margin over the past few years and expect our 2024 operating margin to be in the mid- to high-40% range. Beyond 2024, we expect our progress in driving growth and creating leverage to continue with greater operating margin expansion.
We believe that the combination of the investments we're making across our efforts to digitize the Arches, as well as expanding our restaurant footprint, will lay the foundation for our future success. Turning to the balance sheet and capital allocation, I want to reiterate that our overall position of financial strength, that is the result of our strong discipline in capital allocation. As we ramp up new unit acceleration and the corresponding investment required, we expect free cash flow dollars to continue to grow sequentially each year, with strong free cash flow conversion in the 90% range. We believe our strong investment-grade credit rating is the right one for our business, and over time, we expect to maintain our current debt levels, and our capital allocation priorities remain the same. First, investing in the business to drive growth.
This includes both capital expenditures as well as the investments in technology, digital, and GBS that I spoke about. Second, returning all remaining free cash flow through dividends and share buybacks over time. I'm confident that the plans that we have in place will continue to drive strong financial outcomes for our entire system and our shareholders. With that, we'll thank everyone who has been joining us virtually today, and we'll pause the live stream coverage. We'll pick up with all of you virtually at about 1:30 P.M. Central Time this afternoon.
Please welcome back to the stage McDonald's President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Kempczinski.
... All right, welcome back, everybody. Food coma setting in yet, anybody? Well, listen, welcome back. As I said in my opening, we believe there's still significant runway in our Accelerating the Arches strategy. Hopefully, you see the noteworthy opportunities for near-term growth after hearing from the leadership team and walking through each of our rotations. As we look to the future, we're thinking about the proper long-term ambitions for this business, and we're setting our ambitions even higher, just as our founder, Ray Kroc, did, and as we've continued to do ever since. When asked about the future of McDonald's in 1970, Ray said: "I don't know what we'll be selling in the year 2000, but I know that we'll be selling more of it than anybody else." He was right, and his words ring true even beyond our menu.
Just think, 50 years ago, when we introduced the concept of drive-thru, who would have imagined that we'd have more drive-thrus than anyone else in the world, or that today, our drive-thru would continue to be a competitive advantage for us? 6 years ago, we decided to scale delivery globally, and we are now the largest delivery player in the QSR and have the largest delivery business in the world. 3 years ago, we began the expansion of loyalty globally, and we now have the largest loyalty program in the industry. This ability to identify white space, quickly innovate, and then implement and adopt new ways to delight our customers and grow the business at unmatched scale is inherently McDonald's. When you think about this in the context of our current position, there really is no limit to what we can achieve.
Today, our MCD growth pillars have put us in an advantageous position. With the power and relevancy of our marketing strength, of our core menu equities, and the reach of our digital delivery and drive-thru, we have, without a doubt, built the foundation for one of the largest consumer platforms globally. So just imagine if, alongside this, we can unlock even greater productivity in our restaurants, improve experiences for our customers and crew alike, drive efficiencies, and accelerate our speed to market, all of which will widen our competitive moat. That's exactly what I challenged my senior leadership team and myself to uncover. How can we continuously build upon our MCD growth pillars? And how do we use this dynamic foundation to further the reach and power of our brand and show up for our customers in new and powerful ways?
Now, to talk more about this vision, I'll turn things over to Morgan, Manu, and Skye. Morgan will tell you more about how we're building one of the largest consumer platforms and offer some examples of how that might play out at McDonald's in the future. Manu will detail what it means to have the easiest and most efficient restaurant operations platform and how we think it can unlock more productivity in our restaurants and improve the experience for our crew. And Skye will detail the modern company platform we're building for McDonald's that will drive efficiencies and accelerate our speed to market. Over now to our Chief Global Marketing Officer and Head of New Business Ventures, Morgan Flatley. Morgan?
Thanks, Chris. So today, you all have heard us talk about our ambition to build one of the largest consumer platforms in the world. You all might be wondering exactly what this means. I'm going to bring to life what this could look like and how it will strengthen our business. Now, throughout the morning, you heard from my colleagues about the competitive advantages of three distinct parts of McDonald's: our brand, our physical presence, and our digital ecosystem. Now, each one of these is world-class in its own, but together, at the intersection of all three, they create a consumer engine that we believe is unmatched across industries. First, as Jill shared earlier, our brand is one of the most loved and recognized brands in the world.
In the Kantar BrandZ 2023 rankings of the most valuable global brands, McDonald's rose to the number 5 spot behind Apple, Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft. Put another way, McDonald's is the most valuable non-tech brand in the world, and it's no longer just us talking about McDonald's. Our fans are recreating the brand they love on their own every single day. Whether it's the excitement they feel when the phenomenon of the McRib returns to the restaurants, or fans on TikTok turning the Grimace Shake into a murder mystery that generates over 3 billion hits, the fandom for McDonald's is unmatched. We also have leading physical advantages in over 100 markets across the world. In our largest markets, roughly 80% of the population visits us at least once a year, and most live just minutes away.
As we've shared throughout the day, we're accelerating development to get even closer to our customers. When we combine the fandom of our brand alongside the number of locations, it's easy to understand how our restaurants are at the heart of the communities we serve. They are places where we have the power to bring people together to create experiences and shared memories. Whether that's enjoying a favorite menu item with friends or delighting in the go-to McDonald's order of a superstar, we offer moments of joy and escape for our fans. After all, what other company in the world has the physical presence with the strength of our brand and our fans? As Joe mentioned earlier today, we're also building a presence in our customers' digital lives with over 150 million loyalty users that have been active in the last 90 days.
But our digital ambition doesn't end here. The size of our total loyalty base is 250 million. This includes those who have been active at least once in the last 12 months. This makes us the largest loyalty or subscription program in the world. What's also interesting is only a few of these brands, like Nike and Disney, are true consumer brands that drive engagement and fandom. We believe the passion our customers have for our brand is a differentiator as we continue to grow our loyalty program. Now, when we look at our strengths across brand, physical presence, and digital, it's clear that the power of our competitive advantages go well beyond QSR. We're playing in the same space as the world's largest brands across all industries.
Our position as one of the leading consumer-facing companies in the world unlocks possibilities, not only to bring more customers more often for their favorite meal, but to engage customers in a McDonald's universe that offers unique experiences, builds fandom, and grows frequency. Take, for example, our loyalty program, which, as you heard, we are enhancing. In addition to earning and using points for food, imagine if we offered limited time subscriptions to music or video streaming apps, exclusive merch to create a McDonald's-themed birthday party, or first access to limited edition sauces. That would bring in even more customers more often. Now, imagine if we leverage data and insights from those customers to further deepen our engagement with them. Today, we have over $20 billion in annual system-wide sales from loyalty customers.
This means we know their go-to order, when they like to visit, what they buy full margin, and the offers that trigger additional visits. Think of the possibilities when we grow loyalty system-wide sales to $45 billion, or if we grow even further to $65 billion, and the possibility when millions of loyalty customers are purchasing their Quarter Pounders with Cheese through a digital wallet that is linked to loyalty and stored value. This would enable customers to seamlessly pay with points and cash and transfer loyalty points between family and friends, further deepening their engagement with McDonald's. Not only will we be able to provide more personalized and convenient experiences that drive frequency, but we'd also be able to future-proof our marketing approach. We all know that a cookieless marketing world is fast approaching.
In this new world, we believe we are better equipped to reach our millions of customers through the multiple channels we own. We can feature the food they prefer and nudge them at the right time to place an order or add an additional item. When we connect our first-party data to our paid media ecosystem, we can reach customers with the right message and the right offer at the right moment, creating much, much greater impact. This is a tremendous competitive advantage that will increase the power of the billions of dollars we invest in paid media. Now, beyond deepening how we'll personalize the experience with our customers, we're also exploring what it could look like to leverage our massive customer engine to build our brand and equities across our restaurant estate and our digital channels in compelling new ways that will also grow the business.
As we look toward the future, we continue to visualize different ways to deepen our engagement with customers, and I'll tell you, the possibilities are endless. Let me give you a quick peek behind the curtain with some hypothetical examples of where and how we can play. Now, one thing most people don't know is that McDonald's is one of the largest book and toy distributors, thanks to our Happy Meal program. Imagine if we leverage the strength of our Happy Meal brand equity to commission a book series that engages and inspires children through the beloved Happy Meal promotions. We could use our physical restaurant estate to talk about the books. Then we could use our digital channels to distribute podcasts or audio versions of the books. We could even develop the characters from the books into programming that reaches millions of families via our app.
Or think again about the star of the biggest fan-created social media phenomenon earlier this year, Grimace. We're not used to letting our brand be crowdsourced, but when we let consumers come in and play, it goes viral. Just imagine if we were to create a murder mystery series around Grimace. We could use screens in our restaurants to tease the series and hold sneak peek preview launch events that invite customers into our restaurants and locations for a Grimace Shake. We could even invite Grimace fans to submit stories each month via the app, with the best ones getting featured and published while earning rewards. Think about the level of engagement and sticky behavior we can bring to our business. Or take one of the most iconic moments in sports, the FIFA World Cup Final.
In 2022, it was the most viewed sporting event ever, with a global audience of 1.5 billion viewers. Let's take a quick look.
Every 4 years, the world turns its collective passion to one thing: football! Billions of fans around the globe, in every country, in every community, and in every neighborhood, make football their number one priority. And for the past 30 years, McDonald's has shared that passion. Our fans are football fans, and in 2026, we will celebrate the beautiful game together again.
As you saw in the video, McDonald's has a long history with the World Cup. We've been a partner since the tournament first came to the U.S. in 1994. In 2026, the tournament returns to North America. With just over a third of our global restaurants located in the three host countries, imagine if we supercharge this cultural phenomenon like never before. We could turn 104 matches into 104 exclusive loyalty member viewing parties in restaurants to delight fans, or 104 moments to enjoy McDelivery around the world, or 104 opportunities for fans to engage each other in digital soccer matches on our app to earn loyalty points.
Then, imagine if we could offer our fans the opportunity to redeem those points for a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see their heroes compete in the world's most coveted prize. We could also integrate our Wanna Go to McDonald's World Cup platform into our loyalty program and serve up personalized offers based on when your team is playing, the score of the match, and your favorite item. A tough loss could be softened by consolation fries gifted by a friend or a gloating rival, delivered through a digital wallet. McDonald's is part of the culture today in a way that few others can match, and that's just the starting point for where we're going next.
When we're not just the largest restaurant company in the world, but when we're the largest global omnichannel retailer that combines the power of our brand, our physical footprint, and our digital ecosystem to unlock the power of a world-class consumer platform. So we're truly at the start of something new, not just for McDonald's, but for our fans everywhere, and we're really looking forward to the journey. Key to providing the experience our customers expect from one of the largest consumer platforms in the world is setting up our restaurant teams to deliver exceptional service. Here to talk more about that, I would like to once again welcome Manu Steijaert.
Thanks, Morgan. As you've heard throughout today, we are confident in our plans to build more integrated and personalized customer journeys. Now, I know firsthand from working in our restaurants, that the experience you have as a crew member impacts the experience that we deliver to our customers. At the heart of the McDonald's system is the restaurant, and the heartbeat of every restaurant is our crew. Today, more than 2 million people work in McDonald's restaurants around the world, and I'm excited to talk about the opportunity we see to build the most sophisticated and productive restaurant operations platform. It's one that builds on our heritage of operational excellence, one that leverages the latest technologies to empower our crew to deliver on our customers' evolving expectations.
Because when we are at our best, our restaurants are fully staffed, our crew properly trained, every piece of equipment is fully operational, and our supply chain has delivered the right food and packaging to meet our customers' every need. When we are at our best, we are happy and productive, and our customers are delighted by the experience we provide 65 million times a day. The experience where hot, delicious food is served fast and accurate every time by a crew who always demonstrates world-class hospitality. In other words, and as Chris has said, when we created the McDonald's customer experience function, a customer shouldn't see our org chart reflected in their experience. Now, reality is that complexity has peaked for our crew and restaurant manager.
As we've grown our business and added new ways for our customers to order and receive their favorite food, the crew experience has gotten harder. This complexity is not a consequence of the size of the menu, but it's driven by the new omni-channel reality, which is actually here to stay. When I worked in the restaurants in the 1980s, there were actually two options to order: drive-thru and front counter. Today, those two channels have expanded into 12 different ways for customers to order and enjoy their favorite McDonald's food. In the omni-channel reality we live in today, the single biggest driver of competitive advantage is the customer experience. As we look ahead, our chief restaurant officers and I have been asking ourselves that question: How can we support our restaurant crew and teams to achieve our objectives?
We believe that new technologies, including GenAI, automation, voice ordering, computer vision, predictive analytics, and the Internet of Things, all offer massive potential for the future of restaurant operations at McDonald's. Now, some of these technologies are already in use in our restaurants today. So, for example, over 19,000 restaurants around the world are using a system called eProduction, which uses predictive analytics to provide forecasts to crew on what they need to cook and when, based on expected demand. And this system leads to hotter and fresher food being delivered to our customers, while reducing complexity for our crew. Additionally, in some of our largest IOM markets, we're deploying scales that use AI technology to help crew confirm the accuracy of delivery orders before they leave our restaurants. This also results in a better customer and courier experience. And we're just getting started.
Digitizing the Arches that Brian announced this morning will provide restaurants with a stable and consistent platform on which all these systems and even more sophisticated technologies can run. It would also future-proof our restaurants with the ability to integrate robotics when there's a compelling business case. By leveraging Internet of Things at the restaurant level, we will be able to fully connect our supply chain ecosystem to create real-time visibility into product-level inventory data. This insight will allow us to remain agile, reduce waste, and decrease complexity. Adopting these technologies at scale, alongside our operations DNA and commitment to continuous improvement, can revolutionize how restaurant teams deliver unique and personalized experience to our customers, while delivering a better experience for our crew. It's really exciting to imagine all of the possibilities.
A world where more of our loyalty customers use Mobile Order & Pay to order before reaching the restaurant. Or a world where the Ready on Arrival technology Joe mentioned gives the right information to the right person in the restaurant at the right time, to deliver food faster, hotter, and in a more personalized way. A world where restaurant managers can get text alerts on their phones based on real-time data from the fryer for preventive maintenance, repairs, before the equipment breaks down. A world where kitchen systems automatically optimize product routing based on order size, crew availability, and also double-check for accuracy. A world where sales planning, inventory, scheduling systems are integrated, fully automated, to give managers and restaurant teams more time to focus on customers instead of administrative tasks.
In a world where being able to ask an app on their phones, "How can I improve the drive-through order accuracy at lunch hour?" With GenAI offering actionable suggestions based on real-time data. For much of our systems, this may seem like it's years away, but we've actually seen what is possible from our teams in China. Here to tell you more is our Managing Director of China, Phyllis Cheung. Phyllis, over to you.
Thanks, Manu, and hello, everyone. McDonald's China has grown rapidly. By the end of this year, there will be nearly 6,000 restaurants throughout China, which is on track to meet our goal of 10,000 restaurants by 2028. While we pride ourselves in this incredible progress, the reality is, as we grow, we can run restaurant even more efficiently, enhance productivity, and improve the crew experience. In doing so, McDonald's China deployed Restaurant General Manager Business Operating Service System , or better known as RGM BOSS, across all restaurants. Our restaurant general manager, Apple, will show you how it works. Thanks, Apple. We are proud to say that RGM BOSS has improved overall restaurant efficiency with 30 basis point margin improvement, and that over 95% of our restaurant management team said the job experience has become more enjoyable because of it.
It's simply remarkable to imagine all the possibilities there are for us in the future, and to think these are just a few AI-enabled solutions that benefit our crew today. Now, I will turn it back to you, Manu.
Thanks so much, Phyllis. It's actually inspiring to see the impact of that program, and it represents just some of the innovation happening across the enterprise that we'll continue to explore. As we've often said, the future of McDonald's is always happening somewhere in our system. We just need to find it and scale it, and we can use our scale and leadership role in the industry to accelerate automation efforts by equipment manufacturers and expect the pace of automation in our restaurants to increase. Let me now hand it off to Skye Anderson, who will take you through our company platform and how we are building modern systems and tools that will actually enable our people to unlock speed and innovation.
Thank you, Manu, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Skye Anderson, President of the newest segment of the business, which is Global Business Services, or GBS, as we're more commonly known. This is my 23rd year at McDonald's. In 2000, I celebrated the new millennium by joining McDonald's as a corporate accountant in my home country of Australia, and it's been quite the ride ever since. I've seen a lot in my roles in Australia, the U.S., and now part of the global team. Throughout my McDonald's tenure, I've developed a deep understanding of how our system works globally, the importance of collaboration, scaling ideas, and working efficiently to serve our customers. It can't be understated. As McDonald's grew over the years, our business has become more complex and more siloed. Our systems and processes in areas like human resources and finance are decentralized, which leads to inefficiencies.
Simply put, it can be hard for our people to get things done. We're building GBS to be the engine that will power McDonald's ability to unleash the full strength of our global scale where it counts, so that we can optimize our operations and run the business more efficiently, to improve the employee experience and be a better franchisor to our franchisees and suppliers. Not only will we put systems, processes, and tools in place to run the business more effectively, we'll also free up resources to invest in growth areas that we've highlighted here today. Through our efforts in GBS, we will enable company employees to operate with efficiency and speed in support of our customers and all three legs of the stool. So where do we begin? The first phase of GBS will establish a One McDonald's Way for data and analytics.
Using modern technologies, we'll arm our people with better information to drive even greater value across the business. To do that, we'll integrate hundreds of disparate systems that store data into one integrated solution. In that one solution, data sets from across the enterprise, everything from supply chain to marketing to operations, will be easily accessible to our people through the click of a button. What does this mean in practice? Currently, in the U.S. market, our field operations teams spend about 30% of their time consulting with franchisees and about 70% of their time preparing for those meetings. That preparation time is spent sifting through siloed data sources, dashboards, and spreadsheets to get the information they need to consult the franchisees on growing their businesses. Streamlining our data will enable us to build convenient tools that provide real-time analytics and integrated dashboards to guide decision-making.
Importantly, we'll free our field operations teams from administrative tasks, giving them more time to bring their talents to bear as strategic consultants. And it doesn't stop there. We'll also be able to leverage GenAI to make it easier to access the data. Imagine, a field consultant is preparing for a visit with a franchisee, and they can type in a question such as, "What is the correlation between the number of loyalty transactions and restaurant cash flow?" And instantly have that information at their fingertips. The value of these insights will enable our teams to bring forward solutions that enable our franchisees to both enhance productivity and attract more customers. So as we move forward on this journey, we know we need a GBS strategy that will allow us to continue to build on our ambitions.
We will relentlessly drive transformation with the goal of becoming a world-class GBS organization, and we'll leverage our size and scale to further increase our competitive advantage in the market and drive the long-term success of the system. I look forward to sharing more on this journey as we progress. I'll now hand it back to Chris to close.
Okay, thank you, Skye. So I think it's clear there has never been a better time to be part of brand McDonald's, and we've only scratched the surface of the potential from our Accelerating the Arches strategy.
Today, we've shared with you the additional opportunities we see with our MCD growth pillars. We've showcased the platforms we're building that extend our competitive advantages and unlock new growth opportunities and efficiencies for our business. The truth is that there are very few brands that have reinvented the customer experience time and time again as much as McDonald's. Our success tomorrow has always depended on our ability to stay ahead of our customers' changing needs while reimagining what a restaurant can be. This sense of relentless ambition and innovation has defined our personality and has been part of McDonald's DNA from the very start. In that spirit, before I close, there is one more thing, CosMc's. I thought so. As you've heard throughout the day, McDonald's is operating from a position of strength. Customer love for our brand is stronger than at any time in our history.
This gives us permission to stretch the reach of the valuable McDonald's brand into new areas to grow the business. One area of focus has been identifying ways to, for McDonald's to participate in attractive and fast-growing categories in IEO. We've honed in on specialty beverages and coffee, which play predominantly in the afternoon beverage pick-me-up occasion, where we are under-indexed. In our top six markets, this is a $100 billion category that's growing faster than the rest of IEO and with superior margins. And it's a space that we believe we have the right to win. Yet we can't capitalize this in our existing restaurants because of the complexity that customized beverages would bring to our kitchens. So a little over a year ago, we began to evaluate some potential concepts to break this compromise. We had a few key success criteria for the concept.
First, we had to have a differentiated idea. We needed to be confident that the concept could bring a product or experience that's unique and compelling to customers. Second, it had to have global appeal. McDonald's doesn't do hobbies well. It's not worth our time to develop an idea that will only work in one market. We need big ideas that have global appeal and could work across multiple markets. Third is economics. The unit economics need to work. The potential to offer strong returns and be highly incremental are critical to the adoption and execution of any future expansion of the concept. These criteria ultimately led us to CosMc's, or what would happen if a McDonald's character from the 1980s that was part alien, part surfer, part robot, what would happen if this character were to open a restaurant in 2023?
CosMc's is a small format concept with all the DNA of McDonald's, but its own unique personality. Its menu includes new customizable drinks, sweet and savory treats, and familiar favorites such as the Egg McMuffin. Here's a sneak peek from our first test site that will be opening this week, so take a look.
Something new is coming from the McDonald's universe. Introducing CosMc's, a truly out-of-this-world experience for a new generation to solve the 3 P.M. slump with bold, customizable drinks, blended, boosted, and brewed, made the way you want. Perfectly complemented by delicious sandwiches, bites, and sweets, including some familiar favorites, all served with a seamless, speedy, and no-stress experience. We're testing a range of drive-through configurations, including multiple lanes, which de-stresses the experience, allowing customers to be served at their own pace based on the size and complexity of their order, all delivered through a bold, cosmic-inspired restaurant design. The experience builds on decades of McDonald's excellence, combined with human-centered design thinking, creating a consistent and reliable experience enabled by equipment and technology. A dynamic and highly visual digital menu board enables guided exploration by walking customers through the ordering process, creating confidence in order accuracy.
Credit customers will pay at the order point while we start making their order, creating efficiency and allowing the customers to be inspired for future orders while they wait. The pickup windows are assigned once items are ready, meaning simple orders, example, black iced coffee and mobile orders, equal faster service. This de-stressed process enables a streamlined labor model, where the crew is able to flex across roles and feel confident in their ability to meet customers' needs throughout the process. Since our consumer is a digital native, our app experience is fun, easy, mood-boosting, and encourages exploration. It's easy to navigate and helps you create exactly what you want, made to order, creating an experience where customers feel rejuvenated by more than just their drink. So when the 3 P.M. slump hits and you need a boost, just take a trip to CosMc's.
So CosMc's will be a 10-store test, with one location in the Chicagoland area and the rest in Texas. We plan to open our pilot sites through the first half of 2024 and read results for at least one year. And guys, please let me emphasize again, we're talking about 10 stores, okay? So let's not get too excited about it. It's 10 stores. The big story isn't about CosMc's per se. The big story is what it says about McDonald's and our potential. To think, a little over a year ago, this was just an idea, and this week we're opening the first test site. We're innovating, testing, and learning with speed.... And we'll continue to explore other ideas that can take advantage of our unique combination of assets, opening new growth opportunities, and extending our brand into new areas.
Imagine the possibilities if McDonald's then connected these great innovations to one of the largest consumer platforms in the restaurant industry, enabled by the industry's best restaurant operations platform and modernization and systems and tools that unlock speed and innovation across the company. Based on everything that you've heard today, I hope you can agree that McDonald's is not just the leading restaurant brand in the world. We are one of the leading consumer-facing companies in the world, period, and we're just getting started. I'm confident this leadership team, working together with the best franchisees and suppliers in our industry, will keep McDonald's green and growing while driving long-term value for all stakeholders.
At McDonald's, when we mobilize the best of our innovation, collaboration, and execution across the system, and when we use our size and scale to our advantage, we can do things that absolutely no one else can do, like transforming the QSR space time and again with innovations like drive-thru and delivery. We're accruing one of the largest loyalty followings around the world in just a few years. We're building the best consumer restaurant and operating platforms across the QSR industry and beyond. This is the magic of McDonald's. This is the root of our potential. This is the sort of ambition that we'll continue to emphasize and drive across our entire system, and this is how we will reimagine our future together. With that, we'll now take questions. I think, Mike, you'll come up onto the stage along with Ian. Thank you very much.
Okay, thank you, Chris. Hello again, everybody. We're going to take some Q&A now from the group. We have the full SLT, as you can see on the screen and here with us in the first couple of rows, and like I said, we'll take some questions. We have a closing video before we move on for the day. I think we have mic runners around. Just getting my bearings. It's kind of bright down here. We'll go to Heather, number three over here.
Hi. Thank you. It's Jon Ivankoe, Co-Chief, JPMorgan. Thank you so much for today. It was great. Obviously, this is a very future-focused company, but I know very much, you know, the heritage of your past, and, you know, and the question is, lessons, quite frankly, that we've learned from the past.
I can, you know, remember, you know, my time with this company has been some time now, 1995, 1996, U.S. rate of expansion, very aggressive, you know, 1998-2001, and you're up very aggressive, even the uptick in the U.S. again, 2012-2014. You know, those didn't particularly end well. In fact, you could say, you know, the brakes had to be put on in all three cases, and then the focus was on same store sales and, you know, kind of recreating and restoring the unit level economics of what was already built. So, you know, very data-driven company, future-focused company. This is a very different organization than the ones that I'm referencing in several eras before you. So what lessons have we learned from the past that we can apply to the future? And, you know, just your overall certainty, you know, as we, you know, do talk about reaccelerating the Arches specifically through unit development, that will be entering a lower risk phase while achieving high returns.
Sure. A great question. I think the first thing is you've got to be building off a strong foundation. So if you're trying to drive unit growth and the foundation is not rock solid, it's not going to end well. And the fact that our business is performing the way it's performing right now, I think is a great foundation. The second thing for us is you don't want to be compromising unit growth for remodels and keeping your restaurant estate. We did a lot, as all of you know, we've done the heavy lifting to get the restaurant estate fully modernized. We're north of 95% fully modernized right now, which for us is a tremendous advantage. And I think the other thing is, we've learned the lessons of quantity over quality.
You've got to be focused on quality openings, and so it's why, quite honestly, we talked about at the very beginning of the year, this year, we shared with you the ambition around development, but we didn't share with you the targets, and what we thought was accomplished. And that's because we've spent the last year, country by country, literally city by city, making sure we were confident about where we saw the growth opportunities, and how we could actually have the teams out in the field to be able to go execute it. So I think those things, building off a strong foundation, making sure that you're not compromising remodels for going after unit growth, and then making sure you're focused on quality openings, not just on quantity.
All of those are things that, as you said, we've learned the lesson the painful way, a few different times, and why we, we're very confident we're not going to be relearning that this time.
Maybe I can just hook on that, John. Because I think there are a couple of things just to build on what Chris said, that are really... I mean, the power of data and analytics today and the ability for us, and if you were with Joe and his the breakout today, you would have just seen how granular we're able to get to really identify the opportunity, community by community, the capital discipline that we've put in place in the organization, which to me is about you have to earn the right to get capital. We feel really good about the discipline. Then you go back to what we've tried to drive with Accelerating the Organization that you've heard Chris talk about in this One McDonald's Way . We're going after this with a common mindset.
We're approaching the opportunity completely, consistently across our markets with a global lens, and we're going to bring it to life in a very, very consistent way, which I think is really important to what Chris said.
The hook on your hook. We're opening 1,000 restaurants a year in China. You learn a lot by opening 1,000 restaurants a year.
... I just got, David Tarantino, I think, then Dennis, and I saw David Palmer's hand. I'll work my way this way then.
Hello, it's David Tarantino from Baird. So I guess my question's for Ian, a couple part question about some of the guidance you laid out today. First, on the operating margin for next year, mid-40s to high 40s, I guess. Can you just maybe clarify on what that means relative to the 47% you're targeting for this year? Is it up or down or flat or, you know, how would you characterize that? And then, the real question I have is, you know, really related to the top and bottom line growth you think can translate out of some of the metrics you gave us today. Is there some sort of annual framework you'd like us to think about in terms of earnings growth or total shareholder return?
Yeah, thanks, David. Well, here's how I think about 2024 and beyond. I mean, I think our focus is on, and you've obviously seen that today through what we've talked about with Accelerating the Arches and all the levers that we still think we have ahead of us, is continuing to really grow the top line in a strong way as we move forward. And now, obviously, we're gonna be able to add to that the accelerated openings and layer on that non-comp growth as we kind of build our acceleration as we go forward. As we're able to do that, and I would always go back to fact, 'cause I think fact is probably the best thing I can kind of orientate you to. You go back to what I talked about today, we were at about 43% op margin in 2020...
Sorry, 2019. We'll be at about 47% this year. We certainly believe we're going to be able to continue to grow op margin from an expansion standpoint as we work forward, and continue to focus on how we can drive, leverage, and run the business more efficiently. You heard a bit about that from Skye and Manu, and how we're going to get more efficient at a restaurant basis, but also how we're running the business. So that's how I would think about it from an op margin perspective. I think you layer on, you look back again from an EPS or TSR perspective, I think we've done a pretty good job over the last several years in growing both EPS and TSR.
And you link back, I think, the ability to drive strong top-line growth, the op margin expansion over time, as we can continue to do that with our capital allocation philosophy, which is going to make sure we put capital into the greatest areas of opportunity. I think continue to be very consistent in how we approach the dividend, and over time, ensure that that dividend grows in line with our earnings growth. And then, obviously, any remaining free cash flow we have beyond that, we're going to use to give back to shareholders through share repurchase. I think that then obviously comes together, along with, I think, we certainly believe, a pretty consistent level of debt over the next couple of years. I think we're at about $37 billion at the end of quarter three from a debt level.
Certainly believe that the investment-grade credit rating we have today is the right one, and we're going to certainly look to maintain that. So that's how I would kind of think about the future algorithm as we go forward.
Dennis.
Great. Dennis Geiger, UBS, and thanks to the team for a great event. Another one on development, if I could. Wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the returns on new restaurants or the payback periods, U.S. and maybe, you know, key markets globally, however you want to frame it up. You know, and maybe it's high level, where you've been, how it's trended, where you're going. Anything on that you could provide? Thank you.
Sure. Happy to take that. I think part of our confidence in our ability to accelerate goes back to, I think, the discipline we put in place in making sure we identify the right sites, which is obviously a combination of getting the right location, getting an accurate view of what you think that location is going to do, and obviously, being able to build the site in line with your expectations. And if we look across our wholly owned markets, our level of return has been incredibly consistent and I think, incredibly stable. And I would say we start those first-year returns at the low to mid teen first-year ROI.
When you're looking at drive-throughs, I think what's really important to remember is they kind of build their sweet spot over time because you have to establish that trading area, and so those returns continue to build, I would say, over the first three to five years. And obviously, as you heard Joe talk about earlier this morning, we're going to continue to ensure that we purchase a significant amount of the real estate as we go forward, which is incredibly important to our business model because it locks the cost in, it locks the future equity that we build in that location in, and I think it's critical to allow us to continue to grow returns over time. So we feel really good about that.
We also feel really good about the fact that we've got strong discipline in place that is going to make sure that we monitor how we're doing. And we're seeing that, I think pretty consistently globally, that first-year starting point of sales is pretty close to the average sales volume of the existing base, and that's also another, I think, factor that's really important from a quality standpoint.
I think we got Jeff Bernstein, then I got Brian Bittner, Palmer, and Andrew Charles. Trying to keep track of all you guys in the hands up.
Thank you. Jeff Bernstein from Barclays. Just a question on the, I guess, the category of QSR more broadly. You know, just in the U.S., at least, there's been negative traffic for the industry. Just wondering your thoughts as an industry in terms of reversing that trend in 2024, and maybe you can just layer in the degree of competitive discounting you're seeing, promotional activity. It just seems like the category is perhaps getting more aggressive. And just because you are in 100+ markets, how does that compare to international? Do you think of the QSR category similarly in international in terms of the competitive convergence and discounting and whatnot, or maybe is it something different in the other markets, the way you think about it, versus the U.S.?
... I'll maybe just start it off, and then Ian can pick it up, and we've got the benefit of Joe and Jill here as well to chime in with any additional texture. But you know, our focus is always on growing market share. Whether it's you know, boom economy or recession, our expectation, our focus is on growing market share with that. And you heard today what we consider you know, to be the growth pillars that are consistent with being able to grow market share. I would say, if you remember back where I was talking about in Q4 last year, I was saying, "Hey, we think the U.S. is gonna have a mild recession.
We think it's gonna be a deeper recession in Europe." And here we are a year later, and boy, was I wrong. It's not exactly what we saw at all. So I'm a little bit leery to make any predictions about next year because I think we're continuing to see that the consumer has been very resilient. That said, as I referenced on our last call, you know, there is pressure with the lower-income households. I think, no surprise, you're hearing this from others not just in QSR, but you're hearing it from Walmart and others who have visibility to that consumer. But our focus is all about how do we continue to drive market share and over time, you know, that's been our formula.
Ian, anything else you'd add to that?
Yeah, maybe I'll just add a couple of builds to that. I mean, I think, as Chris said, you know, we've talked pretty consistently over the last few quarters just about the macro challenges that we expected to see. I think we've seen a bit of that as we've worked through the back half of this year. I think obviously higher interest rates, all the inflation level that's passing back through to the consumer, and the pressure that's putting on purchasing power, sentiment, I think savings of obviously through COVID, we've all heard, have been eroded. So you've got all of that. I think it's certainly possible as you look into—I think we certainly think we're gonna work through some headwinds in 2024.
I think Europe, for sure, I think, is gonna be a, a region more broadly, where there are some, you know, market or macro challenges that we're gonna have to navigate. And I think, you know, as Chris said, our focus, and I, I kind of guide us back again to 2019. If you look across our top markets, in almost every case, across our top markets, we've taken shares since 2019, and, and that's how we're gonna measure success. I think we may see some of our larger markets internationally, where we're gonna get, in 2024, perhaps a market contraction. When I mean market contraction, broader IEOs and formal eating out sector, or at least more sluggish growth on the back of these macro pressures.
We're focused on how are we doing versus the competitive set, knowing obviously we can't control the broader context, and are we continuing to take share? I think based on what we've taken you through today, we feel really well about how we're positioned to continue to have advantage against the rest of the competitive set as we work through those, those challenges.
I think the other kind of more macro or broad thing I just would mention is, you know, I think unsurprisingly, if you look to the Middle East, I mean, we are seeing an impact on our business across a number of the markets in the Middle East and a limited number of markets outside of the Middle East with the conflict that's going on, obviously, which is tragic, and I think the societal pressures that have come out of that conflict in the Middle East, you know, I think one of the benefits of our business is our size, our scale, and our geographic diversity, and the breadth of our business, which means we have an incredible amount of resilience as a system.
I think you would if you look back to over the last couple of years and everything we've worked through as a business and how successfully, I certainly feel we've managed through that, I think, is... That's evidence of that. The other benefit, obviously, is when you're a business, you're a company that does business in 115 countries around the world, you've worked through, obviously, many different challenges over the last 60+ years. And it's obviously never easy when you're working through an individual challenge, such as this one in the Middle East. But we're gonna continue to stay focused on obviously supporting our people, supporting the communities we do business with, and working incredibly closely as we have been with our DL partners in the region to get through this.
Maybe let's just take advantage of Joe and Jill, if you would, just offer any additional perspective on the U.S. and then IOM.
Sure. I mean, specifically in the U.S., you know, we believe we have a business and a business model that's built to last. And like Ian shared, I mean, we've been able to navigate things as dramatic as COVID and hyperinflation, you know, just over the last few years. So, you know, whatever happens next year with the consumer, we have a strong and going position, given all the investments that we've made. Obviously, we have industry-leading value, and the brand still has a significant gap versus our nearest competitors around both our affordability and our value perception. We also have tremendous pricing tools that have guided us well through this hyperinflationary period, and I think it'll guide us well through maybe a period of challenge for consumers where they need more value.
You know, we enter 2024 knowing that we can succeed in any environment and, you know, with all the right tools and capabilities to do just that.
Thanks. Just one small build on that, because obviously everything that Joe said is pretty applicable to the IOM markets as well. I think one of the things that we're finding through the kind of the new ways of working and the One McDonald's Way , which you'll have heard referenced a couple of times through the day, is, you know, we're getting so much learning that we're much more able to share across markets. So, you know, the recipe for creating those value-for-money experiences for our customers, the affordability, what, you know, we know the tactics and the strategies that are working because we are able to have much more visibility, with much more open-mindedness about taking the best practices and scaling them. So I think that's another component that is really helping us kind of try and stay in tune with customers.
They are feeling the pressure, interest rates and mortgages, particularly in many parts of Europe, are giving our consumers pressure. So having that gap on against the competition on affordability so that we can continue to grow guest counts, because if we're not able to get customers into the stores, you're not going to be able to get them to hopefully spend a little bit more with us. So focusing on guest counts, offering value and affordability, and ensuring that we're taking the best ideas from around the system and scaling at pace.
I might just add on to Jill there. And we've talked about this a fair bit, Chris and I, on the calls. But, you know, we again, across our top markets, value for money, affordability, always critical for us. Obviously, even more critical when you're dealing with any period of uncertainty as you look forward. Number one position across the majority of our top markets, and I think Jill's segment is a great example of that doesn't just mean you sit back and relax. We are making sure, I think, we're being consumer-led, understanding the needs of consumers as they work through their different contexts. We've got great examples in Germany, where we've introduced a menu called McSmart, which is a value-oriented menu, meal menu.
In the U.K., a Savers Menu , and that is all about making sure we stay agile, we understand how consumers' needs are evolving, and we maintain that leadership mindset of we're going to win and fight hard, I think, for every visit, no matter what the context around us is.
We'll go to Heather's microphone with Brian and David, and then we'll hop over here.
Thank you. Brian Bittner from Oppenheimer. Thanks for the presentations and for taking our questions today. I wanted to ask about the step up in the CapEx guidance that you laid out today. I think you said $300 million-$500 million incremental every year after 2024. Can you just unpack that a little more? How much of that is solely because of accelerating unit growth versus maybe accelerating investments in other areas? And I think that comes out to be about $3.6 billion-$3.7 billion of run rate CapEx in 2027. Maybe you could help us understand how that breaks down. Is there another remodel cycle coming or something like that? Anything else you can help us with?
Sure, Brian. So let me just start with the starting point, I think. So this year will be about $2.2 billion-$2.4 billion. Next year, we said we'd be about $2.5 billion, and then after 2024, we said we'll inch up at about $300 million-$500 million a year until 2027, when we hit our run rate of 1,000 gross openings across our wholly owned markets, US and IOM. And I would think our CapEx probably plateaus roughly at that 2027 point and beyond. I think if you look, and it goes back to what Chris said earlier, we're almost 100% modernized today.
Now, that obviously doesn't mean you never do that again, but we're in such a current position that I think we expect, certainly over the next couple of years, that the reinvestment level that we are spending today is going to stay pretty constant over the next several years. So that $300 million-$500 million is really all going towards new restaurant growth and spend.
Number 3, microphone 3, please.
Okay. Hi, Dave Palmer, Evercore ISI. Thanks for the day. Two quick ones, one on CosMc's and one on digital. CosMc's brand strategy, you're having a new concept here, has some elements of McDonald's brand in it. Some, some of the, even the items from McDonald's are in there. What is your thought about that with the big brand? Eventually, could you imagine CosMc's being a sub-brand within existing McDonald's? So that's my first one, and my second one, is, is on digital. You talked about loyalty today a good bit, and, you've also in the past, given some digital percent numbers, like 30% in the US, 40%, the, the big six or whatever it is. You know, 17%, I think, was the loyalty going to 27% or so, by 2027.
I'm wondering, you know, how does that interact with the digital mix? And in the US, the drive-through doesn't really work that great with digital. In other words, it's a bit of a retardant to a digital interaction. So where do you see that going? I mean, 27% seems kind of low. Maybe you have some bigger solves for that. I'd love to get your thoughts about it. Maybe step change beyond that, and what would make that happen?
Mm-hmm. Let me, let me start with the easy one, CosMc's. I think we're in test, which means we're, we're open to learning all sorts of things. And I, I think we'll see, based on what we learn, in that, how it does or doesn't work with, the master brand, as, as you say. So, time will tell on that. To your point on or your question on digital, I, I guess I would start with... I wouldn't agree that, that digital doesn't work well in the drive-through. And, and as evidence of that, we're at 150 million, loyalty members. And in markets like China, 90% of, consumers are ordering digital.
I do think what you're hearing from us today is counting digital is almost too easy, because our digital number is going to continue to grow. And by the way, everybody's digital number is going to continue to grow because consumers are getting to be more and more digital. What really matters is how many of those digital transactions you're actually turning into loyalty transactions. Because if you go back to the data that we showed, what drives the business is actually loyalty membership, much more so than digital. And so for us, the key is about driving loyalty at the number that if I'm all of you guys, and what we're going to be reporting ourselves against, is the loyalty number, because that is going to be the one that's going to be most closely tied to, is it driving the business?
And then if you're in loyalty, you can imagine all sorts of ways that it is quite complementary with the drive-through experience. So for us, you know, we don't look and say drive-through is impediment to what we can do with loyalty. We look at it as drive-thru is another great asset that we have, and I wouldn't trade us having drive-thru for anybody else who has less drive-thru. So it's about how do we take that advantage and make even more out of it?
That's why when you see, you know, what we think we can do with loyalty, we think we can get to 250 over the next several years, because we're gonna continue to find ways to make the loyalty program more and more valuable, where, quite honestly, you won't, it won't make sense to be a McDonald's customer and not be in loyalty.
Go to the microphone two, Andrew Charles, Nick, and then Jake.
Great. Thanks. Andrew Charles, TD Cowen. The guidance for 900 U.S. net restaurant openings over the medium term is just confidence on U.S. store-level cash flow growth for the foreseeable future. And curious, looking beyond traffic, you know, what are the medium-term opportunities and levers to find efficiencies to improve U.S. margins in an industry backdrop, where pricing is likely going to throttle back and value activity is going to step up? And in particular, I'm looking to know if voice AI at the drive-thru fits into this, as it seems like the industry's approaching a tipping point with this.
So maybe just one correction, Andrew, and then I might ask Joe to, to join me, on the U.S. bit of your question. I mean, it's 900 gross openings, and I can help you guys a little bit with the math on that, just because I'm sure there are some other questions. So I think we said between now and end of 2027, 900 gross openings in the U.S., 1,900 in IOM, 7,000 in IDL. Obviously, we've got closings as a normal course of business across each of the segments. So the way I would think about the end state by end of 2027 is, just over 14,000 restaurants in the U.S., just over 12,000 restaurants in IOM, and about 24,000 restaurants in IDL, just to kind of help you with the math.
I'll start on the U.S., but obviously, Joe can give you a lot more texture. I mean, you know, we are, I think Jill touched on this, we're a volume business at the end of the day. So our goal is always to drive more volume through the restaurants. It goes back a little bit to what Chris was talking about when we talked about why we've added the fourth D, is we've earned the right over the last few years because we've driven significant volume through the existing business, which has opened up the opportunity, I think, both from a brand penetration and expansion standpoint, for us to grow at a more significant pace. So of course, the way we grow margin sustainably is we grow volume. That's always the focus.
And at the same time, you know, I think, we've talked a fair bit in some of the calls just about, I think, the capability we've built around pricing and some of the advantages that gives us. And even if we get into a more normalized environment from a pricing standpoint, how we're pricing, right, to get that minimal consumer resistance, to get the maximum flow through, is certainly a lever that we think we're going to be able to continue to pull smartly. In addition, as you kind of get down to personalized value, which then you really get on a one-to-one basis over time, right? Where you're really able to maximize the value for the consumer and the value for us from a business standpoint.
I think those are the types of things, in addition to driving volume, which is obviously core to what we do, on how we're going to focus to continue to drive margin as we go forward. But I think Joe can build on that.
I mean, Ian nailed much of what I generally talk about with our franchisees. Our franchisee cash flows are strong. They've grown significantly this year, so they find themselves in a very advantageous position, obviously, as they close out the year. Ian hit it, that, I mean, our contribution margin on incremental sales is incredibly strong, and so growing the top line is still the greatest opportunity they have to build cash flow. Our pricing capabilities, like Ian also said, are incredibly strong, have been helpful as we've navigated the last several years. And then what I always say to franchisees is the greatest opportunity for efficiency is in everyone's pocket.
It is the digital consumer is much easier and more efficient for us to serve than the non-digital consumer, because that digital consumer obviously does the order taking as well as does the cash step. And so ultimately, we believe long term, the digital consumer can be accretive to margins at the restaurant level.
Go to number 2 again, Nick.
Thank you. Nick Setyan from Wedbush. You know, follow-up to Andrew's question. How should we think about that build, you know, in terms of the U.S. and the IOM unit growth? You know, is it a pretty linear build, you know, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027? And then you guys have to mention pricing power a few times, you know, throughout the presentation. Obviously, versus 2019, the average check is up, you know, over 30% or approximately 30%. How do you think about pricing going forward, particularly relative to grocery? Thank you.
Well, I'll take the pricing, and then I'll let Ian do the more detailed breakdown. But I think you hit it on the head, which is we have talked about our pricing power and our ability to actually push through the pricing because of the inflation. We would credit to the fact that we've got tremendous equities in our brand, the focus on our core menu equities. As Jo talked about, you know, there is no substitute for a Big Mac. There is no substitute for McDonald's french fries, a McFlurry, et cetera. So it gives us pricing ability in that, and we look really closely all the time at flow through, how much, which is basically how much of the pricing drops through to the bottom line, this elasticity of pricing.
And we've seen, despite a lot of the pricing that we've pushed through, we're seeing that flow through is still holding up. Now, we're of course, mindful about our pricing is in relative-- is, is always considered from a consumer standpoint, relative to what else is out there, whether that's, restaurant competitors or to grocery, et cetera. And so we, we continue to look at that very closely. One of the great things about digital is now you can scrape pricing around a restaurant far more easily. So you've got incredible visibility to all the pricing that exists around restaurants in our developed markets these days, which has given us a great capability to make sure that we don't get offsides on that. And then the other thing that we're doing is we continually monitor affordability and value for money ratings and getting consumer subjective assessment of how are we standing in those areas. And we continue to lead in almost every market around the world on value and affordability. So all of that together kind of goes into our pricing strategy. It's why we feel like we've been able to push through the pricing that we've done.
But at the end of the day, the McDonald's brand is built on being able to deliver customers great value, and so that's gonna be our focus, going forward. Maybe I'll let you handle the second part of that.
Sure. So just on the opening acceleration, I mean, the endpoint, as you said, is 1,000 per year in the wholly owned markets from a run rate perspective. We've got about a 24-36 month lead time, knowing that the vast majority of our new sites are gonna be freestanding drive-through sites. And so I would think of it as a gradual acceleration between now and getting to that 1,000 unit run rate in 2027.
We'll go to number one here, and then four in the back. Next.
Great. Jake Bartlett, Truist Securities. My question is about the control you have over that unit growth. And, you know, typical franchise systems, you kind of want the franchisees to open, but you're not sure if they're going to. You're unique in that you own a lot, you know, the properties and have involvement there. So, you know, how much visibility do you have on the growth? Are you putting incentives in place or anything else that's kind of driving growth, you know, going forward that we hadn't seen, you know, in recent years?
Sure. I'll answer that. So we feel very confident that there's gonna be good franchisee excitement about the growth opportunity. And one of the things, when you meet with franchisees and you talk about investments, there's always investment for new restaurant opportunities. It's usually more of, "Why didn't I get more restaurants to open than the ones that you're letting me open?" I think the other thing is, our franchisees, particularly relative to our competitors, they're in a great financial position. If you look at our U.S. franchisees, the firepower that they have on their own organization balance sheets, combined with the ability through McDonald's to get preferred rates from lenders, there's no lack of access to capital at all.
So I think for us, it's about really making sure that we're focused on quality openings, because when you get the quality openings, that builds franchisee confidence in going after the next one and the next one. So I think we've done the homework. We've had conversations with franchisees at a high level on this. And I think through history, it's shown when we have real growth opportunities, our system's willing to get after it, and certainly we're able, whether it's through, you know, what we do with franchisees or there may be McOpCo growth that we do along the way as well. Not looking to change the overall mix, but we always have McOpCo as a lever to bridge a gap that may exist in the market.
We'll go to number four in the back.
Thank you. Katherine Griffin from Bank of America. The gap between restaurant growth and its contribution to system sales implies a mix shift towards lower volume markets. In that context, could you talk about the profitability of the China market, specifically as you think about taking a bigger ownership stake in the China business? The contribution to revenue will be higher, but what are the implications for contributions to profits? And, is there an opportunity to improve the profitability of that market? And then, as a follow-up, I was curious if you could talk specifically about Canada, as one of your top six markets, and how you think about opportunities for growth there. Thank you.
Sure. Well, I'll take the China question, then I'll have Jill handle Canada. So we're very confident and excited about the opportunity in China. There's three things that, for us, give us a lot of excitement about what's possible there. The first is the potential for new restaurants. And, you know, we're approaching 6,000 restaurants in China today. We talked about earlier, when we announced our purchase of the Carlyle stake, getting to 10,000 restaurants by 2028.
Honestly, if you look at our typical development penetration, and compare it to other markets, whether it's 2 per 100,000, 3 per 100,000, 4 per 100,000, and there's no reason why China can't be a 20-25,000-store market for us, which would be the largest market for us around the world. The other thing that we know is we know that unit volumes are correlated to household incomes. So if you just take a look at GDP growth in China and assume, you know, mid-single-digit household income growth correlated with GDP, it says that we're gonna continue to see nice growth in unit volumes, which is Comp Sales. And then the last piece that you touched on is margins.
We see no reason why China can't have restaurant margins that are on par with what we see in other developed markets for us. So you take all those things together, we think the opportunity in China is massive, which is why we stepped in and increased our participation, as you saw fit. Jill, I'll hand it over to you to talk about Canada.
... Sure, thanks. Yeah, Canada is one of my top-performing markets at the moment. Actually, it's performing extremely well, growing share. And, you know, in fact, Chris and I were there a few months ago in Alberta, and looking at the shift in some of the population that's going on. We definitely see significant opportunities for growth in Canada, across the country, actually. And I think certainly given the performance of the market, it's when I go and ask Ian for capital, I think it will be one that we certainly see opportunity investing in.
Maybe just to come back, 'cause I think there was a question in there just about the mix shift. I mean, you go back to the numbers I gave. So you still got over the next years out to 2027, 70% of our openings coming in IDL. And yes, in markets like China, we have average lower average unit volumes, and obviously, we collect a different percentage 'cause we're just collecting a royalty. I think I would say a couple things, just to build on Chris's China comments. We're getting really strong first-year returns and overall returns in China 'cause they've reengineered the business model for the context and the environment. You saw a little bit today from Phyllis and team, just in terms of what they're doing to digitize the organization and the efficiencies that's driving.
I think that's what's been so important about the partnership we've had to date and the things that it's brought to life. The benefit, obviously, of what we're doing with openings is the acceleration in the wholly owned, right? I mean, we're gonna be 2.5 times the rate of opening as we get to that 1,000 openings per year, and obviously, we get a much different share of the mix in much higher volume locations, which is obviously why that is gonna be really attractive and beneficial, not just for us, but obviously for the franchisees that will be in those restaurants as well.
And just one other thing, and think about, we've got 70 million loyalty members in China with less than 6,000 restaurants, and it's because 90% of transactions in China are digital. So when you, when you think about the number of loyalty customers you could have in China, 10,000 restaurants, 20,000 restaurants, it's massive. And all the benefits that come from that would be driving the business as well.
We'll go to number three with Lauren Silberman, and we might have time for one more after that.
Thank you. My question's on menu innovation. Can you expand on how you're thinking about innovation next year? What's the appetite to bring back items like the Snack Wrap, to lean a little bit more into value and industry trends? And then on the flip side, you talked about bigger burgers today. Is this reflective of a strategy to further lean into the premium side of the menu and just what you're seeing there? Thanks.
Morgan, why don't you talk about how we think about menu innovation broadly, and then, Joe, I'll let you answer the question of, are we bringing Snack Wraps to the U.S.?
You're not even going to start?
You've got it completely in hand. I have total confidence.
Yeah. So I'll start with your question about menu innovation, in particular, large burger. It's actually really grounded in opportunity space that we see based on the customer. So we spend a lot of time. We've talked a lot today about data and research, really understanding where there's meaningful opportunity space for our customer globally. And the one that we've identified, that Yo talked about this morning, is what we call large burger. And what we've seen is, you know, that's a sizable space, it's growing, and we're actually significantly under-shared in that space. So it's less about chasing premium, and it's much more about kind of identifying where the customer is and where we have a big growth opportunity. So thank you.
I'm shocked and surprised by the question, but thank you. I think Joe also, Joe summed it up very well when he talked about, obviously, the fact that we're building brands within the chicken space. If you think about it, in the US business, we have three really strong chicken brands, between McChicken, Chicken McNuggets, and obviously McCrispy. But McCrispy, we're in the early days, really, of building that brand. And so, you know, as we sort of look forward, you know, will we eventually have a McCrispy Tender? Yes. And will that allow us to eventually have a McCrispy Snack Wrap? Yes. But we're still in the early days of doing that. And some of you have heard me talk about the importance of sequencing in our business.
You know, around the world, I've seen when we get sequencing wrong on something, you can have the effect where 1 + 1 + 1 = 2, whereas when you get the sequencing right, you can have an effect where 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. And I think our thoughts around our chicken portfolio and how we, you know, are going to build the chicken portfolio in the U.S. are such that we want to make sure we get it right, so that 1 + 1 + 1 = 5.
I think we have time for one more. We'll go out to the guy with the red Crocs in the back.
Thank you. I had just a clarification, then a question. Just, Ian, your comment on the debt being stable the next several years, is that leverage or is that absolute dollars of debt? And then my question is, maybe for Chris, on the Global Business Services, I think this year, a lot of what changed was you took finance functions and HR functions in from some of the regions. As we go the next two or three years, what are some of the key areas you think you either pull out of the regions or technology changes? Is there any more clarity on what is actually happening at the ground level? Thanks.
I'll let you start with the easy one.
Yeah, you do the easy one.
Yeah, the absolute dollars on debt.
Oh, you want me to, you want me to do GBS?
That's it? That's all you're gonna do?
That's all I gotta do.
I was ready for your elequence. So, on GBS, you know, the thing on GBS, we're starting with the opportunity in finance and people. This is gonna be something that takes us the next couple of years to be able to get the leverage that we need. You've heard us talk about, but in finance, we have something like 600 different finance systems. In HR, we have something like 200 different HR systems. We're gonna be getting to one finance system. We're gonna be getting to one HR system. That's gonna give us much better visibility into the business. It's gonna give us efficiencies in the business. It's gonna have all sorts of benefits attached to that.
As you think out beyond that, there's opportunities to extend GBS. You've seen it with another number of other companies. You could certainly imagine it can extend into legal, where things like, for example, contract views that might be able to be something that's done through a GBS service. Pricing technology and pricing model, that could be done as a global shared service. So development is another one. In terms of site identification, development could be run as a global shared service. So I think there's lots of things that for us, we see the potential to bring in some capabilities and just do it once around the world. But we're starting with the two big ones being finance and HR. So with that, I think we're done with questions.
Am I right, Mike?
Yeah.
Okay.
Wrap up Q&A.
All right. Now, just I want to thank everybody. Hopefully, you found today useful. I know it was a big commitment out of your time to come here, but I think just being in our headquarters as well, you hopefully got a little bit of a vibe for McDonald's and got a chance to see the team as well. We're gonna be upstairs, I know, in a few minutes, and continue the conversation. But again, thank you for your interest in McDonald's, and appreciate it.
Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Ian. Thanks, all of you. I just said we're gonna close with a video, so just sit tight and bear with us for one minute, and then I'll give instructions on where we go from there. Thank you all!