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Fast food giant McDonalds is rolling out two big additions to its menu this week, including an old crowd-pleaser and a new take on a 50-year-old breakfast sandwich. Heres what you need to know about the companys Spicy McMuffin breakfast sandwiches and the return of the Snack Wrap. McDonalds debuts new line of Spicy McMuffin breakfast sandwiches The McDonalds Egg McMuffin breakfast sandwich is perhaps the most iconic fast food breakfast item in the world. As a matter of fact, its so iconic that McDonalds has a page on its site dedicated to the history of the Egg McMuffin. The delectable breakfast sandwich was first invented in 1971 by Herb Peterson, a McDonalds owner in Santa Barbara, California. In 1972, the sandwich got its Egg McMuffin name and went on sale in test markets for just 63 cents apiece. And in 1975, McDonalds rolled out the Egg McMuffin nationally. Egg McMuffin 50th anniversary Yes, it has now been 50 years since the Egg McMuffins national rollout, and in celebration of this milestone, McDonalds is releasing a line of new Spicy McMuffin breakfast sandwiches. The Spicy McMuffin sandwich has the egg, cheese, and bacon we all love, with the addition of a Spicy Pepper Sauce. McDonalds is also releasing the Spicy Sausage McMuffin and the Spicy Sausage McMuffin with Egg to complete the lineup. What is the release date for the Spicy McMuffin? The Spicy McMuffin sandwiches go on sale today, Tuesday, July 8, and will only be available for a limited time. According to McDonald’s, they will be available at participating locations across the United States. The beloved Snack Wrap returns, too But what McDonalds fans seem most excited about is the return of the Snack Wrap. The wrap was originally introduced in the United States in 2006 and became a favorite among many due to its crispy chicken and burrito-like form factor, making it easy to eat on the go. The Snack Wrap featured white meat chicken, cheese, lettuce, and a choice of sauces. But in 2016, McDonalds discontinued nationwide sales of the Snack Wrap in the United States due to declining sales. Some locations still sold the handheld menu item until 2020, before it disappeared for good. But now the Snack Wrap is back. McDonalds has confirmed it will go on sale on Thursday, July 10. According to Axios, it is expected to be a permanent menu item and will cost $2.99. Will menu changes help McDonalds sales? McDonalds is bringing back the Snack Wrap and introducing new versions of a beloved classic at a time when consumers are increasingly conscious of the prices they pay for fast food, which was once seen as a reliable, low-cost meal option. In recent years, fast food prices have skyrocketed, causing consumers to question their value. Many fast food places have been trying to lure price-conscious consumers back with time-limited deals and special menu items, hoping that these will help boost their bottom line. As for McDonalds most recent quarter, fiscal Q1 2025, the burger chain reported a global comparable sales decrease of 1%. Sales were even worse in the United States, where comparable sales decreased 3.6%. Since the beginning of the year, shares of McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE: MCD) have been on a bumpy ride. After falling to a year-to-date low of below $277 per share in January, MCD stock bounced back to highs of over $321 in May. But since then, MCD shares have tumbled again to close at under $294 as of yesterday. Since the new year began, MCD shares are now up about 1.2%. Over the past 12 months, MCD shares have increased nearly 17%.
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E-Commerce
Dolores Ballesteros, a Mexico-based mother of two, was getting desperate. Her 6-year-old son kept hitting his brother, age 3, and seemed angry at her all the time. No matter what she did, she couldnt get through to him. At her lowest moments, she says, I really thought he was acting like a psychopath. Last Mothers Day, she asked her husband for outside help: a subscription to the Good Inside parenting app and its AI chatbot. Ballesteros began using the chatbot to coach her through her sons temper tantrums in real time. It encouraged her to ask him about his feelings and embrace the most generous interpretation of his actions. That was really good for my relationship with him, she says. It also reminded her to set aside time for herself. The chatbot told me that I only have so much patience, she recalls. Today, Ballesteros feels more connected to her son and more confident as a parent, and she credits the companion in her pocket with the transformation. Launched last August, the Good Inside chatbot is trained on the teachings of Manhattan-based clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy, known to her 3.2 million Instagram followers as Dr. Becky. Kennedy had a thriving practice focused on helping parents through difficult moments with their kids when she hopped onto Instagram in 2020 to share her wisdom. She quickly found an audience, especially among parents who were struggling to manage their kids in COVID lockdowns. In her plainspoken videos, Kennedy coaches parents through common dilemmas (for example, difficult potty training, or how to speak with a teen who feels fat) with an emphasis on developing a healthy parentchild relationship. Often appearing in sweatpants and with messy hair, she films her videos between family therapy appointments or in the aftermath of a struggle with one of her own children, ages 13, 10, and 7. This makes Kennedy all the more relatable and equipped with actionable advice. She aims to create sturdy parentswho embrace their authority around their children but dont assert it too stronglyand she frequently reminds them that their kids are essentially good, even if they act out. Using this framework, which Kennedy calls the Good Inside method, she believes parents can tackle just about anything that comes their way. Her insights are now the basis of a growing business empire. In 2021, Kennedy and Erica Belsky, a fellow psychologist and the wife of investor and A24 Films partner Scott Belsky, cofounded the Good Inside company, which has 47 employees and plans to add an additional 18 this year. In June, Good Inside hired Daniel Shlossman, a former Uber, Sweetgreen, and Wonder executive, as its first president. Through the company, Kennedy has published a handful of books and launched a podcast. She and Belsky also created an online community where, for $23 a month or $279 annually, members can access live classes, online workshops covering everything from managing mom rage to building kids confidence, and the Good Inside appwith its OpenAI-powered chatbot, named Gigi, thats modeled on Kennedys writings and videos. The app currently has more than 80,000 members in more than 100 countries, and its on track to double its membership by the end of the year, according to Kennedy, putting the companys annual run rate in the tens of millions of dollars. Most of that growth is organic, through word of mouth and Kennedys social media presence. Good Inside raised $10.5 million in 2023 from G9 Ventures and Inspired Capital. The company is profitable, and Kennedy and Belsky have no plans to raise more money. The only thing that comes naturally in parenting is [mimicking] how you were parented, Kennedy says. But that approach doesnt work for everyone. Kennedy says theres no shame in enlisting tech for help. We already use AI to track our health, learn languages, and develop professional skills. Kennedys great insight was to deploy the technology in the service of healthy parenting. Good Insides app is taking off amid rising interest in chatbot-based therapy. A handful of startups, like Wysa, have introduced conversational agents trained on cognitive behavioral therapy and other methods. Slingshot AI, which has raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others, is creating a foundational model specifically for therapy. Users of apps like ChatGPT and Character.AI, meanwhile, have been experimenting with creating therapeutic chatbots of their own. Critics caution that theres little research to back up the efficacy of these chatbots, and that AI cant reliably provide accurate medical advice. (Indeed, Character.AI is facing lawsuits claiming its bots endanger children.) But since in-person therapy is more expensive than everaveraging between $100 and $200 a session in the U.S.and increasingly difficult to access as demand grows, the idea of harnessing chatbots to bring down costs and reach more people is appealing. Kennedy sees her companys chatbot as making accessible many of the lessons that she offers clients from her office. She says that the apps subscription fee is reasonable compared with the money that people might spend on traditional therapy. When you compare the price with anything else that involves mental wellness, the value you get far exceeds the value youre investing. (Parents must pay out of pocket for both Kennedys in-person practice and the Good Inside app.) Even so, Good Insides app is more of a coach than a full-blown therapist, offering advice without becoming too personal. According to chief product officer Tiffany Shi, the only customer information the company currently stores is the ages of children, most of whom are between 2 and 12. That keeps the chatbots advice fairly generic. In Fast Companys tests, many of its answers followed the Good Inside frameworkassuming good intent, setting boundaries, acknowledging a childs feelingswhile adjusting the language based on a childs age. The chatbot seemed to default to generating advice in a way that validates parents feelings, opening responses with lines such as That sounds hard. The app has additional layers. When the chatbot delivers a response, parents have the option to click a tab to access related content. The app also includes a section similar to a Reddit board that allows users to provide moral support to one another. And there are daily bite-size lessons, delivered via swipeable cards that feature videos and written tips. Both the lessons and the AI-generated answers often include scripts that parents can use when speaking to their children. We want parents to have a way to learn the language of parenting, Kennedy says. But the chatbot remains the centerpiece of the app, and Kennedy sees opportunities to bring the experience of using it closer to family therapy. Right now, the chatbot is purely responsive, reacting to parents queries, she says. But the best help a parent could get is if the chatbot anticipates things and answers questions they dont have yet. She gives an example of a parent whose child keeps throwing tantrums in the grocery store: If you always ask the chatbot what to do, it might feel like Groundhog Day. But what if the chatbot could say, Lets zoom out for a moment. Nothing is wrong with your kid, but I would love for you to jump into this four-minute video and this step-by-step guide, becaue this has happened a few times. To create these kinds of interactions, the company would have to harvest more information about users than simply their childrens ages. Mike Krieger, Anthropics chief product officer and a cofounder of Instagram, serves as a mentor to Kennedy. He envisions the app developing a memory component, with profiles of users and their kids, based on parents queries. There could be a situation where youve talked to [the chatbot] for long enough that you could ask it, What are the thought patterns I tend to get stuck in?” he says. (Kennedy says that data from parents chats would only be used to train the Good Inside chatbot.) Personalization is on Good Insides road map, though the company declined to comment on a timeline or whether it would introduce subscription tiers to support such features. And there are limits to how far therapeutic chatbots can go, says John Torous, director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Its possible to superficially customize a chatbot where it uses your name. But if youre really looking for deep personal patterns, it takes a lot of data, he says. You need billions or trillions of data points to get good at learning a person. For now, Good Inside makes clear in its terms of use that its chatbot isnt a therapy substitute. Thats a way to avoid liability, but its also a simple fact. The chatbot may not know everything about a parents situation, but it knows enough to offer assurances to its users that they are good parents and their children are good kids. And that might be good enough.
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E-Commerce
Senior leaders at every company know that being able to innovate successfully is critical to their future. But too few of those leaders truly understand how to foster innovation across all segments of their organizations. Innovation is not just the purview of a few supersmart individuals walled off in an ivory tower isolated from the rest of the company. Every employee from the stockroom clerk to the senior design engineer can contribute to innovation if they believe its valuable to do so. And not every innovative idea needs to be as disruptive as the iPhone or generative AI. Even incremental innovations can add meaningful value. Companies shouldnt limit their view of innovation only to projects targeting the next big breakthrough. Open it up to a broader swath of ideas from large to small. Here are five reasons why innovation initiatives fail (and what to do about it). 1. Lack of Commitment from Senior Leadership It takes more to inspire innovation than senior leaders who give speeches to employees or highlight it in annual reports. Employees need time, resources, and support to explore ideas outside their day-to-day responsibilities. During my tenure as general manager for a tech companys communication hardware, I targeted 5% of the overall organizations time for blue-sky innovationthe phase where ideas were being initially explored. I didnt expect this to be time employees could use in secret, but rather a plan agreed upon between employees and their manager to pursue an idea. I also knew that not every idea would be successful. Rather than penalizing employees when an idea didnt work out, I used it as a learning experience to improve our ability to innovate in the future. I knew that nothing would discourage innovation more rapidly than for employees to believe their careers would be damaged if their innovative idea was not successful. 2. Employees Dont Understand Your Objectives Innovation thrives when employees understand their companys businessits mission, priorities, and core valuesand believe they can make a difference. Without this context, any useful innovative ideas they come up with will be due to little more than blind luck. Some senior leaders hesitate to share this vision. They worry that if an employee leaves to join a competitor, theyll share what they have learned with their new employer. But you dont need to share trade secrets. Think of what might be shared in a public companys annual report: information that helps employees connect their work to the broader mission. This is especially important for those who are not involved in strategic planning. Manufacturing staff or clerical personnel can have valuable innovative ideas, but they will often only share them with their managers if they think they will be supported. For example, an assembly line worker might have ideas for how to improve the manufacturing process in ways the engineers supporting that same line dont have. A manager whose response is you just worry about building the product and let us worry about innovation is killing innovation, just as surely as the senior executive who never supports it in the first place. 3. Innovation is Not Built into the Companys Plan Although this can be a problem at any company, it is especially prevalent in large, multinational corporationsthe result of something I call the curse of the corporate business model. Investors expect the company to deliver continual, predictable growth and profits. Investing in new, untried ideas that take many months or years to produce results does not align with the need to deliver predictable results. Many managers in the corporate world are reluctant to take on this risk, especially since corporate culture often penalizes failure more than it rewards innovation. This doesnt mean large companies cant be innovative; it just means innovation has to be built into the plan. Even if specific innovation projects are not yet defined at the time of the companys annual budgeting process, a commitment to innovation must still be built into the plan. How much? It depends on the industry. For a company in a well-established mainstream market, adding 10% to the businesss R&D budget for innovation projects should not draw undue attention from investors. For companies in newly emerging or high-growth markets, investors may even expect the number to be much higher. 4. Innovators Dont Understand Actual Market Needs Some people say that innovation should be done in isolation, away from the influence of customers. They point to Henry Fords alleged quote, If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. But that misses the point. Innovation will only be successful if it fills a true customer need. Customers can tell you their problem, but dont expect them to tell you the solution. A faster horse does not describe the customers problem; its only one idea for a solution. Instead of taking suggestions at face value, the innovators job is to get past that to understand the true problem. If Ford had probed more deeply, he may have heard that the speed of the horse was fine when it was moving, but it had to stop to rest every few miles. And a horse needed food and water every day, even when the customer wasnt going anywhere. With this insight he would have understood the customers true problem and been in a better position to be truly innovative. Fords lack of attention to customer needs wasnt a problem when he introduced the Model T because there were few alternatives, but continuing to ignore the customer is what caused Ford to lose market leadership to General Motors in the 1920s (and never recover). 5. Innovation Projects are Managed Incorrectly Innovation projects cant be managed the same way as a revenue-producing business unit. Truly disruptive innovations may take many months or years to deliver financial returns. A better approach is to structure the innovation project as an in-house startup. The project is measured not by monthly financial results, but by its ability to deliver to the metrics the team has committed to on the schedule they have promised. In the early stages, the focus should be on answering fundamental technical and market questions, so the metrics may only cover the next month or next quarter. As confidence grows and the probability of success improves, a longer-term plan can be established.
Category:
E-Commerce
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