(Bloomberg) -- McDonald’s Corp. is targeting customers who stopped visiting after an E. coli outbreak hit the chain earlier this fall.
The company said some diners who use its in-app loyalty program have stayed away since Oct. 22, when McDonald’s disclosed the outbreak. Though the “vast majority of customers” kept frequenting the chain, a “very small number” pulled back, McDonald’s US president, Joe Erlinger, said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
“We’re working through testing right now different messages, different offers, different deals,” to those customers, he said. “They come in regularly enough that since we hadn’t seen them for three, four weeks, we were comfortable with the fact that we needed to do something different in order to get them back in our restaurants.”
McDonald’s temporarily pulled its popular Quarter Pounder from many restaurants in October after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was investigating an E. Coli outbreak linked to fresh slivered onions that killed one and sickened more than 100 between Sept. 12 and Oct. 21.
US health authorities said Tuesday that the outbreak is over. Last month, McDonald’s said it is spending $100 million in an effort to win customers back, with about one-third of that budget going toward ads and marketing.
Ahead of the outbreak, the Chicago-based chain had made progress on reversing a US sales decline it had experienced earlier this year, leaning partly on offers such as the $5 meal deal it debuted this summer.
In November, McDonald’s unveiled a new value platform it’s calling McValue, which will feature the $5 bundle along with an offer to buy one item and add one for $1. In addition, it will have local deals and discounts for app users.
It replaces a previous menu that had items that cost as little as $1, a price point that has been difficult for the chain to maintain due to inflation.
“These things run their course because you can’t hold the prices that you’ve introduced,” Erlinger said on Thursday.
The company’s new strategy promotes the chain as a destination for value, rather than specific price points, as consumers continue to feel stretched due to the high cost of essentials.
Americans are grappling with an “inflation overhang,” Erlinger said.
“People want prices to go lower, but actually it’s just the rate of increase that’s going to significantly slow,” Erlinger said, referring to the slowing pace of inflation. “You’re going to have this vision of what you paid back in 2019 that you’re never going to pay again. And I think that takes time and adjustment.”
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