McDonald’s Moves to Broaden Drinks Business, Testing Red Bull and New Sodas
Seventy years after the handshake that symbolized the McDonald’s Coca-Cola partnership, the relationship is showing strain as McDonald’s pursues a bigger role in beverages. The chain is preparing to launch a Red Bull energy drink line, its first move of that kind, while also rolling out six new proprietary fizzy drinks this year, including “dirty soda” and brightly colored refreshers aimed at younger customers.
The shift reflects both slowing hamburger sales in the United States and the huge growth of drinks as a standalone business. Starbucks and Dunkin, formerly Dunkin Donuts, have shown that beverages can generate billions on their own, and the global drink market has nearly doubled over the past 15 years to $100 billion. McDonald’s chief executive Chris Kempczinski created a new role in 2025 for Charlie Newberger to focus entirely on beverage development. “We need someone who thinks exclusively about what our beverage business should look like five years from now,” Kempczinski said at the time.
The McDonald’s Coca-Cola relationship has long been close but not always smooth. In the 2000s, as soda sales declined, several joint efforts failed, including the Freestyle machine that let customers mix their own drinks and Coca-Cola’s Vitaminwater, which did not pass testing in McDonald’s restaurants. McDonald’s also gave some machine space to Dr Pepper and even tried selling PepsiCo products.
Coca-Cola has reason to worry, even though its new CEO Enrique Brown said the partnership remains “fantastic.” He added, “We respect their decisions, but always aim to be the number 1 supplier for every drink type for every consumer.” The real trigger was Starbucks, whose colorful, heavily branded refreshers became a $2 billion business. McDonald’s tried its own standalone drinks brand, CosMc’s, in 2023, but shut it down after a year and a half. Even so, it learned from the experiment, and early trials of the new dirty sodas and Red Bull combinations in Colorado and Wisconsin have drawn enthusiastic reactions, including a TikTok user who wrote, “Oh no, I think I have a new addiction. This is really tasty.”
