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About the McDonald's Casebook
What can you learn from McDonald's's strategic decisions? How did McDonald's handle the forks that defined it, and what happened next? The knowledge of these decisions will help you glean insights, inspiration and actionable ideas. The McDonald's Casebook comprises 7 verified decision records with dated outcomes.
Every record follows the same structure, which is what makes the set useful rather than merely interesting. You see when the fork came, what was on the table, what the company chose and the reason it gave, what it committed, and what happened at one, three and five years. Every fact is cited to its source, and where we offer a judgment, it is labeled as one. Across the 7 records, which span 1956 to 2022, 7 carry dated outcomes; 5 of the decisions held, 1 were reversed, 1 held in part, and 0 are still too early to call.
Why it is worth your time
Following one company across every kind of decision it faced shows you something a single case never can: how its choices compounded. The McDonald's Casebook covers 6 decision types, from The Turnaround, The Counterfactual, The Pricing Lens and more, with forks between 1956 and 2022, so you can see the pattern in how McDonald's sized its bets, when it reversed, what it committed, and what came back. Each record carries the same fields and every source, which is what lets you compare a pricing move with an acquisition and a crisis response on equal terms.
Who reaches for it
Anyone competing with McDonald's, selling to it, investing in it, or learning from it: strategy teams sizing up a rival, consultants building a company profile that goes beyond the annual report, investors who want the decisions behind the numbers, and faculty who teach the company as a case.
What it saves you
Assembling comparable precedents by hand is slow work: find each decision, date it, read the filings and the coverage, pull out the same fields, and check every number. At three to four hours a record, this set is roughly 25hours of a strategist's time. It is $299, once, and every record has already been through the same fields and the same checks.
How people use it
In the memo, you cite the records that match your question, outcomes and sources included, straight from the Word appendix. In the room, the PowerPoint gives you one record per slide with an action title and a source line. In the model, you sort the Excel by verdict, horizon or capital committed. And in your AI workspace, you load the JSON as vetted context, so the assistant reasons from verified records instead of inventing them.
What is in the download
A sample record
One record, free, exactly as it appears in the files. The other 6 verified records are in the purchased files.
| Company | Fork date | The fork | Options | Choice | Stated rationale | What happened | Judgment analyst | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| McDonald's Read the story → verified | 2022-02 | Whether to roll the McPlant out nationally after the ~600-store demand test |
| Conclude test, no rollout | Sales landed at or below low-end projections and franchisees saw no evidence to support a national rollout | Latest · 2022 Full-year 2022 net revenues: fell 9.8% to $418.9 million, with a net loss of $366.1 million and a gross margin of negative 5.7% | reversibility high verdict held | QSR Magazine (2022-03); CNBC (2022-07); Beyond Meat, Inc. (SEC 8-K / Investor Relations) (2023-02); Beyond Meat, Inc. (SEC 8-K / Investor Relations) (2024) |
What is in this casebook
7 verified records across 6 decision types: The Turnaround, The Counterfactual, The Pricing Lens, The Flywheel, Market-Entry Gambit and Adjacency Expansion.
Questions
- What do I get in the McDonald's Casebook?
- 7 verified decision records on McDonald's across 6 decision types. Each one tells you when the fork came, what was on the table, what the company chose and why, what it committed, and what happened at one, three and five years, with every source named, as Excel, JSON, PowerPoint, Word and PDF.
- How do I know the records are accurate?
- Every record is drawn only from the story it comes from and that story's sources. Every fact carries a citation and a verbatim excerpt, a mechanical check rejects anything the story does not contain, a second model from a different vendor reads the record against the story, and a third arbitrates any disagreement. Only records that pass all of it are in the files.
- Is this a subscription?
- No. It is a one-time purchase, re-issued whenever a story a record rests on changes. The library license keeps every casebook current for a flat annual fee.