McDonald’s puts U.S. operations and technology under one COO

McDonald’s Corporation named Skye Anderson to a newly created U.S. chief operating officer role on March 30, 2026, bringing restaurant execution and several supporting functions into one operating team.

Anderson will directly lead U.S. National Operations, Restaurant Development and McOpCo, the company-operated restaurant business. Her remit also includes oversight of U.S. Technology and Supply Chain. The announcement distinguishes direct leadership from oversight but does not provide a detailed reporting chart. McDonald’s leadership announcement

Two other assignments complete the reshuffle:

• Mason Smoot, previously U.S. chief restaurant officer, becomes senior vice president of Global Franchising and Delivery. His responsibilities include franchising standards, franchisee engagement and execution frameworks across markets.
• Mattijs Backx becomes chief transformation and services officer, leading Global Business Services, or GBS. He previously served as senior vice president of GBS Transformation.

Anderson had led GBS since 2023. Her move brings experience in shared corporate services back into the U.S. restaurant organization. Both Smoot and Backx join the Global Senior Leadership Team.

McOpCo also connects the new role to restaurant testing. The annual filing describes company-operated stores as places to train personnel, refine operating standards and test franchisee innovations. That gives the operating team a setting for evaluating ideas before wider use. 2025 Form 10-K

Restaurant technology already reaches into the work#

The operating relevance becomes clearer in McDonald’s August 2025 account of its digital investments. Its Edge computing platform, developed with Google, was then operating in hundreds of U.S. restaurants. The platform brings cloud capabilities into individual locations. Digital transformation update

McDonald’s also described scales that compare an outgoing order’s weight with its expected weight and flag possible omissions. Those devices had reached thousands of restaurants in a dozen markets, across drive-thru and delivery. That was a global deployment figure, rather than a U.S. total.

These are technologies that change a crew member’s next action: investigate a flagged bag, finish an order or hand it off. Their usefulness depends on how software, equipment and restaurant routines fit together.

The same update described a separate corporate effort to consolidate finance and human-resources tools into one cloud-based enterprise solution. That work helps explain the connection between Anderson’s former remit and Backx’s new one. Both restaurant systems and shared services are changing, but they serve different users and tasks.

Two levels of transformation#

McDonald’s 2025 annual filing described its restaurant platform as an intended universal software foundation. The stated objective was to make innovation easier to deploy across restaurants with less complexity. Its company platform, led through GBS, focused on how the wider organization works. 2025 Form 10-K

The filing also puts a cost and timeline around the broader organizational program. McDonald’s incurred $226 million in restructuring charges during 2025 under Accelerating the Organization. It anticipated approximately $250 million more in 2026, primarily for professional services, with transformation continuing toward expected completion in 2027.

Those are enterprise restructuring figures. They do not establish the cost of the new COO position or a savings commitment attached to Anderson’s appointment.

The new U.S. role joins restaurant operations and technology oversight, while Backx leads company-wide services. These appointments define responsibility for coordination without supplying a new timetable for deploying restaurant systems.