McDonald’s is expanding its beverage lineup beyond its long-dominant partnership with Coca-Cola, introducing its own custom sodas and preparing to sell Red Bull energy drinks for the first time. The moves come as U.S. burger sales growth slows and competitors such as Starbucks and Dunkin have built billion-dollar drink businesses, pushing the chain to look for new sources of revenue.
This spring, McDonald’s introduced its own custom sodas and refreshers, and it is gearing up to launch Red Bull in its restaurants, a first for the Golden Arches. Coca-Cola has been involved in crafting some of the new beverages, using Sprite and syrups to concoct brightly colored dirty soda drinks, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The relationship between the two companies dates to 1955, when Coca-Cola executive Claude “Waddy” Pratt met McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc in Des Plaines, Ill. Pratt thought the chain Kroc envisioned stretching coast to coast needed a signature drink. Their handshake deal sealed what Coca-Cola later described as brands “attached at the sip.” Coca-Cola formed a dedicated division, known as The McDonald’s Division, to serve the account, and the partnership became a pillar of both companies’ identities.
McDonald’s executives and franchisees have for years pressed for more drink options from Coke, the Journal reported. Past attempts at innovation sputtered. Coke’s Freestyle soda dispenser, which let customers create their own mixes, required more work than it was worth and did not boost sales, said Jim Lewis, a former McDonald’s franchisee who tested the machine in his Queens restaurants in the early 2010s. A test of Coke’s Vitaminwater also ended.
Coke CEO Henrique Braun, who took over in March, said in an interview that the company’s partnership with McDonald’s remains “fantastic.” On McDonald’s addition of Red Bull, Braun said Coca-Cola respects its customers’ decisions but aims to continue being the “number one provider of every choice of beverages for all consumers.”
At the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade show in Chicago last month, Coke showed off a range of drinks still under development, including a rainbow-hued frozen energy drink and pink drinks aimed at younger consumers. Josh Gurley, Coke’s head of transformation and strategic growth, said traditionally the company would not showcase beverages still under development. Coke passed out tastes of drinks such as Strawberry Hot Honey Lemonade and Blueberry London Fog, a departure from its usual practice of finalizing term sheets before showing new products. “This is a little uncomfortable for us,” Gurley said.
McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, who joined the company in 2015 from Kraft Heinz and previously spent eight years as an executive at PepsiCo, has set his sights on selling more drinks. The global beverage market nearly doubled in the prior 15 years to $100 billion, and he wanted McDonald’s to capture a bigger piece. In 2023, McDonald’s launched a short-lived restaurant concept called CosMc’s that served lattes, frappes, slushes, and other novelty drinks. Its five locations closed roughly 18 months later, but McDonald’s incorporated what it learned. Kempczinski in 2025 appointed Charlie Newberger, the executive who led CosMc’s, to oversee McDonald’s beverage development. “We need somebody who’s single-mindedly thinking about what McDonald’s beverage offering needs to look like in five years’ time, given that the world is going to be different,” Kempczinski said.
In late April, McDonald’s invited a few dozen social-media influencers to its Chicago headquarters for a sneak peek at the new beverage lineup. Jennifer DelVecchio, head of McDonald’s U.S. beverage strategy, said at the event that early tests showed customers ordering the new drinks instead of sweet tea, lemonade, or other fountain drinks, but traditional sodas did not take a bigger hit than other fountain beverages.
McDonald’s has tested new drinks in Colorado and Wisconsin, including a Sprite Lunar Splash made with Coke’s lemon-lime soda, along with drinks incorporating Red Bull and flavored syrups. Some restaurants also tested beverages with a generic energy drink base, but Red Bull stood out. “Uh oh, I think I have a new addiction. This is actually really good,” one McDonald’s customer said in a TikTok post about the Red Bull test.
McDonald’s has long taken unusual measures to ensure its Coke tasted better than anywhere else, including installing filtration equipment for the cleanest flavor, keeping soda syrup and carbonated water just above freezing to increase fizz, and frequently calibrating machines to ensure the right syrup-to-water ratio. Coke conducted regular quality reviews of McDonald’s equipment. The collaboration paid off in innovations like the extra value meal in the 1980s, which bundled a sandwich, soda, and fries, a concept now standard across the industry.
The partnership has faced strains before. In 2010, McDonald’s gave fountain spots to Dr Pepper, largely displacing Coke’s Mr. Pibb. PepsiCo helped Taco Bell strike gold with Mountain Dew Baja Blast, a soda developed just for the chain that debuted in 2004 and grew into a brand with more than $1 billion in annual sales. Starbucks’ fruity Refresher beverages, introduced in 2012, became a $2 billion brand, capturing younger consumers.
Coca-Cola executives have taken notice of the shifts. Some have worried about the company’s top-tier status at McDonald’s, the Journal reported. Coke is now testing a new beverage machine for making dirty sodas and other syrup-infused drinks, and McDonald’s representatives examined the equipment at the trade show. “As we do with all our customers, we respect their decisions,” Braun said, “but we always try to push to continue to be the number one provider of every choice of beverages for all consumers, and it’s no different for McDonald’s.”