The McDonald's-Krispy Kreme Implosion: What Co-Branding's Biggest Failure Means for QSR

When McDonald's and Krispy Kreme announced their national partnership in March 2024, the deal landed like a thunderclap. Fresh doughnuts, delivered daily, to 13,500 domestic McDonald's locations by end of 2026. A distribution machine like no other in the doughnut business. Krispy Kreme stock popped. Industry observers called it a masterclass in asset-light brand extension.

Sixteen months later, it was over. Effective July 2, 2025, the partnership ended. Krispy Kreme pulled out, citing costs that simply wouldn't reconcile with what consumers were actually buying. The company absorbed $28.9 million in lease impairment and termination charges and an additional $22.1 million in asset write-downs. Revenue fell 13.5% year over year in Q2 2025 to $379.8 million, missing analyst projections by a wide margin. The stock collapsed more than 70% from its peak.

For anyone studying the economics of QSR co-branding, this is the case study of the decade.

What the Deal Actually Was

The March 26, 2024 announcement called for a phased national rollout of three Krispy Kreme products: the Original Glazed, Chocolate Iced with Sprinkles, and Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled doughnuts. Delivered fresh daily. Available individually or in six-packs from breakfast onward, while supplies lasted.

The concept built on a regional test in the Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky markets, roughly 160 McDonald's restaurants where, according to the official joint announcement, "consumer excitement and demand exceeded expectations." That test result was the justification for going national.

The structure was meaningful for Krispy Kreme. At full scale, the McDonald's footprint would more than double the brand's total points of access. Krispy Kreme's existing Delivered Fresh Daily channel, a hub-and-spoke model where production hubs manufacture and distribute to spoke locations, would grow dramatically. The company had approximately 150 U.S. hubs collectively serving just under 6,000 DFD spokes. Each hub averaged about 40 spoke relationships. Serving all 13,500 McDonald's locations would require a fundamental reconstruction of that infrastructure.

By the time the rollout paused in May 2025, about 2,400 McDonald's restaurants were receiving Krispy Kreme doughnuts. That's roughly 18% of the domestic system. The nationwide ambition never got further.

The Anatomy of the Failure

Krispy Kreme CEO Josh Charlesworth was plain about the cause: efforts to "bring our costs in line with unit demand were unsuccessful." That sentence deserves to be studied carefully, because it contains three distinct problems compressed into one.

The demand problem. The Kentucky pilot tested in markets where Krispy Kreme already had strong brand recognition and distribution infrastructure. Those conditions don't automatically transfer to a 13,500-location national footprint. McDonald's breakfast traffic was already under pressure heading into 2024 and 2025. The company's own executives acknowledged on earnings calls that breakfast was the "most economically sensitive" daypart and the weakest in terms of traffic recovery. Adding a premium doughnut to a value-stressed menu, in a system where customers were already pulling back, was a structural mismatch from the start.

McDonald's morning visit share fell from 33.5% of traffic in the first half of 2019 to 29.9% in the first half of 2025. The co-brand landed at precisely the wrong moment in the breakfast cycle.

The product-context problem. Krispy Kreme's value proposition is anchored in freshness. The signature experience is a hot glazed doughnut, just out of the fryer, at a Krispy Kreme location. McDonald's cannot replicate that. The "fresh daily" positioning is accurate, but "fresh daily" is not the same as "hot and fresh." During winter months, at least one McDonald's operator reported receiving product that arrived frozen during cold weather transit. The gap between the brand's promise and the product-in-hand experience at McDonald's was real.

The logistics cost problem. The hub-and-spoke model that Krispy Kreme built its DFD business on wasn't designed to serve 13,500 quick-service restaurants spread across every corner of the country. To scale that network, the company needed new hub locations, new cold chain logistics infrastructure, expanded technology, equipment, and support staff. Those capital outlays were calculated against demand projections that, outside the Kentucky test market, never materialized at comparable rates.

The Wall Street Journal reported high logistics costs and "slower-than-expected" sales as the primary drivers of the pause announcement in May 2025. The company pulled its full-year financial outlook at the same time, which is never a signal of controlled confidence.

The Investor Fallout

When Krispy Kreme paused the rollout on May 8, 2025, shares fell 24% in a single session. Truist analyst Bill Chappell downgraded the stock to hold and stated: "We are shocked by the speed at which the story fell apart."

That analyst reaction matters. The McDonald's partnership had become central to the investment thesis for DNUT. When the company first announced the national rollout in March 2024, Krispy Kreme's pitch to investors was essentially: we have a world-class distribution mechanism through this partnership, and it will unlock DFD economics at a scale no doughnut brand has ever achieved. Investors who bought that story got burned hard.

A class-action lawsuit followed, filed in federal court in North Carolina. The complaint alleged Krispy Kreme made misleading statements about the business's condition in the aftermath of the McDonald's deal and argued the company overhyped the deal's potential. The investor class potentially covers purchases made between February 25 and May 7, 2025.

By the time the partnership officially terminated in July 2025, Krispy Kreme's market capitalization had fallen from roughly $1.69 billion at the start of 2025 to under $700 million by year-end. The company entered 2026 planning refranchising, cost reduction, and a shift to third-party logistics to handle DFD distribution.

Why McDonald's Came Out Fine

The asymmetry of outcomes here is instructive. For Krispy Kreme, this was an existential strategy that went wrong. For McDonald's, it was a breakfast menu add-on that didn't move the needle and was quietly retired.

McDonald's did not disclose any material financial impact from the partnership's end. The company has 13,500 domestic restaurants. The Krispy Kreme products were available in fewer than 2,400 of them. Doughnuts were never a core McDonald's SKU, and they weren't expected to drive traffic the way value promotions or core menu renovations do. The Big Mac matters. The Egg McMuffin matters. A glazed doughnut available while supplies last does not carry comparable weight.

The disparity in stakes is the first lesson of this story. The junior partner in a co-branding arrangement almost always carries disproportionate risk. Krispy Kreme needed McDonald's more than McDonald's needed Krispy Kreme. When demand disappointed, the cost structure became Krispy Kreme's problem to solve entirely.

What Successful Co-Branding Actually Looks Like

The Taco Bell and Doritos Locos Taco is the canonical success story in QSR co-branding, and it's worth revisiting the reasons it worked where the McDonald's-Krispy Kreme arrangement failed.

First, there was no incremental supply chain burden. Doritos-flavored taco shells replaced an existing component of a product Taco Bell already served. The co-brand added no delivery complexity, no cold chain requirements, no additional logistics infrastructure. The operational lift was almost entirely on the branding and marketing side.

Second, the product category was aligned with core occasion. People go to Taco Bell for tacos. A Doritos-flavored taco shell is a flavor upgrade within that core occasion. The McDonald's-Krispy Kreme deal asked consumers to change their McDonald's occasion from "breakfast sandwich" to "also, pastry." That behavioral shift is harder to drive than a flavor upgrade.

Third, Doritos and Taco Bell share overlapping audience profiles. The Locos Taco launched in March 2012 and sold more than 100 million units in its first 10 weeks. Over a billion units have sold since. The brand equity of both companies amplified the other; neither was a passenger on the other's distribution network.

The structural difference: Doritos Locos was a product innovation. The McDonald's-Krispy Kreme arrangement was a distribution agreement. Those are fundamentally different co-branding models with fundamentally different risk profiles.

The Operator Takeaway

For franchise operators evaluating co-branding arrangements, the Krispy Kreme collapse offers a clear set of warning signs.

SKU complexity at scale kills margins. Every product added to a QSR operation carries training costs, waste exposure, storage requirements, and prep time. A daily fresh-doughnut delivery adds a product category that requires specific handling, has a short sell window, and generates waste when sales fall short of projections. At the unit level, operators who received Krispy Kreme product were managing a supply of perishables against unpredictable demand. That's a real cost, and it lands directly on the franchisee.

Third-party brand equity is not transferable. Consumers who love Krispy Kreme love the Krispy Kreme experience. The chain has trained customers to associate the brand with warm, fresh-from-the-shop quality. Receiving a delivered doughnut at a McDonald's counter is a diminished version of that experience. When a co-brand depends on the emotional equity of the partner, the channel must be able to deliver that equity. McDonald's operational model, designed for speed and throughput, was not built to replicate the Krispy Kreme shop experience.

Asymmetric stakes require careful due diligence. If a co-branding deal is central to your strategic narrative to investors and marginal to your partner's business, that imbalance should trigger serious scrutiny of the unit economics before you build infrastructure around it. Krispy Kreme's investor communications in early 2025 were still optimistic about the McDonald's channel at a point when internal data almost certainly showed demand falling short. That gap between public posture and private reality is what produced the lawsuit.

Where Krispy Kreme Goes From Here

The company's 2026 plan involves refranchising stores, reducing capital intensity, and outsourcing logistics for the DFD channel to third-party providers. The goal is to preserve the brand's reach without bearing the full cost of a proprietary cold chain distribution network.

The doughnut category still has real economics. Krispy Kreme generates revenue, has loyal customers, and operates in a segment with pricing power. The question the market is now asking is whether the company can build a profitable, scalable distribution model without a single anchor partner that exposes the entire operation to a demand shortfall.

For investors, the market cap trajectory tells the story plainly: from $1.69 billion in January 2025 to under $540 million by early 2026. That's $1.1 billion in destroyed equity, traced in no small part to a distribution bet that didn't hold.

The Broader Signal for QSR Co-Branding

The McDonald's-Krispy Kreme episode will show up in business school case studies alongside the Doritos Locos Taco as a paired lesson in what co-branding can and cannot accomplish. The macro lesson is not that co-branding doesn't work. It's that co-branding works when the logistics are simple, the brand equities are genuinely complementary, and the stakes are proportionate.

The lesson for every QSR operator, franchisor, and investor evaluating the next splashy co-brand announcement is simple: find out who needs whom more. That answer will tell you almost everything about how the deal ends.