BOLINGBROOK, IL, — In a drab cinder block building, located where Chicago’s denser suburbs begin to shade into the city’s vast agricultural hinterland, McDonald’s is honing a drive-thru-focused concept it hopes will become a genuine competitor to Starbucks and Dutch Bros.
The CosMc’s unit in Bolingbrook is McDonald’s first test location of the beverage-forward spinoff brand, which launched in December. The Illinois restaurant will be the only CosMc’s outside of Texas, where nine units are slated to open in 2024, for the duration of this stage of McDonald’s pilot, Sheila Hamilton, McDonald’s marketing and menu lead for new business ventures, said.
The restaurant brand is designed to capture Gen Z fervor for snacking occasions and complex, customizable caffeinated drinks. Restaurant Dive’s Gen Z reporter visited the store while attending the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago to see how the brand stacks up to category rivals.
“This one is really our learning lab,” Hamilton said of the restaurant.
From the road, CosMc’s doesn’t look like much: a largely windowless store without a dining room plopped uncomfortably close — about 100 feet — to a traditional McDonald’s unit. The proximity provides a sharp juxtaposition of the chain’s present strength with its potential growth into a new category.
CosMc’s exterior, clad in blue-purple , is so nondescript that if it weren’t for the Golden Arches in its streetside sign — or the distinctive typography it shares with McDonald’s — its purpose wouldn’t be obvious.
Hamilton said the Bolingbrook unit’s scale isn’t representative of the type of store McDonald’s has in mind for CosMc’s, however. Ultimately, the brand is working toward a prototype roughly one-third the size of a McDonald’s store, and somewhat smaller than the Bolingbrook location, which will save on development costs. Hamilton didn’t share the square footage of the Bolingbrook CosMc’s. Before it was a CosMc’s, the location was a Boston Market, and from a consumer’s perspective, it looks strange for a building so large to have no dining room.
The push to shrink footprints in order to trim overhead reflects a broader trend among limited-service chains with drive-thru focused units.
Gen Z springs for colorful custom drinks
McDonald’s designed CosMc’s menu in collaboration with its supplier network, Hamilton said. The brand is particularly targeting flavors that are both popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers, and differentiated from McDonald’s classic menu. This approach has attracted a broad range of consumers, Hamilton said, without cannibalizing McDonald’s traffic.
“We are seeing a little bit more [than we expected] of millennials bringing their Gen Alpha children in,” Hamilton said. “A little bit more of that cross-generational appeal than we had originally expected or planned for. So we really love that span, [with] Gen Z being our core.”
CosMc’s menu is dominated by highly-customizable, brightly-hued drinks, such as the Sour Cherry Energy Burst. Hamilton said the brand has developed a caffeinated, flavorless “energy syrup” that can be added to or subtracted from its drinks, and guests can add customizations like boba to standard drinks, as well.
“Customization is the name of the game,” Hamilton said.
McDonald’s, Hamilton said, was missing out on Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers because it lacked a strong, versatile, customizable drinks program. But the operational complexity of such a program would have slowed the speed of service at traditional McDonald’s restaurants.
Customization has caused operational bottlenecks at Starbucks, for example, prompting the coffee giant’s redesign of its kitchens and spurring thousands of its baristas to unionize.
“That's why we pulled it into a separate concept,” Hamilton said of throughput concerns. “So that we could really deliver on those customer expectations, while building off of some of those equities from McDonald's brand.”
A CosMc blast of sugar and caffeine
Successful beverage occasions, Hamilton said, are about fulfilling three types of customer demands: desire for refreshment, energy and a treat.
CosMc’s menu delivers more than just a hint of energy. A large size of its Churro Cold Brew Frappe, which Hamilton said is one of its most popular beverages, packs a shocking 462 milligrams of caffeine — the equivalent of about five cups of coffee per the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s estimate for coffee’s caffeine content.
By contrast, that’s 70 more milligrams of caffeine than what was included in Panera’s notorious Charged Lemonade, which may have killed multiple consumers before the brand axed the drink earlier this year. The large Churro Cold Brew Frappe also contains 81 grams of sugar. Even a small size includes 276 milligrams of caffeine and 52 grams of sugar.
“Originally we just called it Churro Frappe,” Hamilton said. “We weren't clear then to our customers that [it] included a good amount of caffeine, that's one of our highest [caffeine totals]. So we renamed it quickly to drive some of that clarity.” Restaurant Dive abandoned the effort of finishing the Churro Cold Brew Frappe during our Sunday night tour of CosMc’s, rather than risk insomnia.
Restaurant Dive sampled two other beverages, as well — the Sour Cherry Energy Burst and the Sour Tango. Of the three drinks, the Churro Cold Brew Frappe tastes the best, with a flavor that belies its caffeine content, more closely resembling coffee ice cream than cold brew. The Sour Cherry Burst is also quite good, but at times too sweet. The Sour Tango Lemonade is fairly indistinguishable from a standard lemonade.
The food underwhelms
CosMc’s offers food as well, though dining plays second fiddle to the drinks, in a reverse of McDonald’s usual emphasis. Unlike the Golden Arches, the unit doesn’t have grills or fryers to maintain operational simplicity.
“The food was really built to complement the beverages,” Hamilton said.
Restaurant Dive tried all four of the brand’s snack bites and both of its sandwiches. Of those options, the strongest were the McPops, a donut-hole snack which McDonald’s sells in some international markets and at its headquarters. Beneath the lofty heights of the McPop, the menu passes from good hashbrown bites to serviceable pretzel bites.
CosMc’s culinary nadir is the snack box, an imitation of charcuterie marred by pepperoni with a cheap, almost delicate texture and artificial spice flavor, and nearly inedible gouda — the cheese has a disturbingly soft mouthfeel and leaves a chemical aftertaste.
The chain’s sandwiches are both egg-based and designed for breakfast, and available in creamy avocado tomatillo and spicy queso varieties. They’re a notch above standard fast food breakfast sandwiches, though the brioche bun is too weak and began to disintegrate before the sandwich was finished.
But fast food’s quality is not meant to compete with fine dining on the merit of its cuisine; it’s meant to compete on convenience, price point and speed of service.
Our ticket total was surprising: three drinks, four snack items and two small sandwiches cost a total of $47.98. A mobile order of the same number of similar items at a Dunkin’ near CosMc’s cost $41.04. According to a William Blair analysis emailed to Restaurant Dive when CosMc’s first opened, the Bolingbrook CosMc’s unit offers a modest discount, about 7%, compared to nearby Starbucks units.
Speed of service lags
With a four-lane drive-thru, the Bolingbrook CosMc’s seemed positioned to fulfill its promise of fast food. But it didn’t — at least in Restaurant Dive’s case. From the time Restaurant Dive pulled into the drive-thru, behind one other car, and the time we were asked to drive up from the ordering point to the window where we collected our food, 17 minutes and 56 seconds had elapsed.
During that time, several cars pulled into the drive-thru line behind us, thought better of the endeavor and exited.
According to Intouch Insight’s 2023 Drive Thru study, McDonald’s customers average total drive-thru wait time was six minutes and fifty-three seconds. By comparison, Restaurant Dive’s wait at CosMc’s was more than twice as long.
Speed of service data for Starbucks and Dutch Bros is somewhat more opaque, though when Starbucks debuted its Siren System for back of house, it said a mocha frappuccino takes about 83 seconds to make.
Dunkin’, with its egg-based sandwiches, drive-thru focus and customizable roster of sugary, caffeinated drinks, is also a fair comparison for CosMc’s. The New England stalwart clocked a total time of five minutes and 21 seconds in the drive-thru in 2023, per InTouch Insight’s report, or about one-third of the time of Restaurant Dive’s CosMc’s drive-thru wait.
The drive-thru lane experience was somewhat confusing, as well. The digital display boards play repeating ads right up until the car is adjacent to the board, and only then does it show CosMc’s menu, a drawback for a brand with a highly customizable, mostly new menu.
After ordering, the traffic flows from four ordering points to a single lane, served by three windows. The lane was too narrow for a car to leave if it had received its order at one of the windows further back and the vehicle ahead of it was delayed in receiving its food. To manage that prospect, customers paid at the ordering kiosks and CosMc’s employees verbally instructed the cars to move forward to a designated window.
Hamilton said McDonald’s hasn’t determined how long the CosMc’s pilot phase will last.
“We're learning as much as we possibly can during this time,” Hamilton said. “So when a decision is made [on expansion], we're ready to go quickly.”
