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Talk about Grim reaping. The benefits, that is.
This quarter, McDonald’s saw an 11.7% increase in global comparable sales for the quarter and double-digit growth across all US and international segments—and seems to have a large, purple creature to thank for that.
On the company’s earnings call, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the theme of the quarter was Grimace, a McDonaldland character from the ’70s who was revived this quarter as part of a birthday shake campaign. According to Kempczinski, Grimace content was viewed more than 3 billion times on TikTok—some of that likely stemming from the popularity of the Grimace Shake trend, a seemingly organic phenomenon in which people pretended to die after drinking it, for some reason.
“We took the nostalgic experience of celebrating birthdays at McDonald’s and repackaged it for a new generation,” CFO Ian Borden said on the call. “It quickly became one of our most socially engaging campaigns of all time, with millions of reactions on our social media posts.”
The company also announced it would be pulling from its character vault in another way: creating a spin-off restaurant called CosMc’s—named for a McDonaldland alien from the ’80s. According to Kempczinski, the chain will have “all the DNA of McDonald’s but its own unique personality,” with more details to come by the end of the year. New restaurants are set to open in a “small handful of sites in a limited geography beginning early next year.”