Chris Kempczinski
President And Chief Executive Officer at McDonald's
Thanks, Mike, and Good morning. At the heart of McDonald's is the experience we offer. And for 65 years, we've created iconic experiences for billions of people around the world. Along the way, we've always focused on following our customers' needs, finding the most convenient and engaging ways for them to enjoy McDonald's. At our founding, the restaurant experience was relatively simple: Customers would walk up to the front counter, place their orders and get hot, delicious fresh food served to them quickly. In the early 1970s, McDonald's pioneered the drive-thru as a new service channel for customers. And in the last few years, we've added even more service channels with delivery, curbside pickup, kiosks and table service.
At the heart of each of these innovations was our global mobile app, which has evolved our customer experience from the physical world to the digital world. As this evolution continues, our digital offerings will become even more important to serving, interacting with and delighting our customers around the world, and the insights generated from these platforms will help us further improve their experience. Our marketing power and scale will continue to be critical throughout this journey, turning the various customer touch points into a holistic and compelling brand experience. But our aspirations are even higher. And to reach these goals, we need to create a more frictionless customer experience across all our service channels. Our customers should be able to move seamlessly between the in-store, takeaway and delivery service channels so that we offer even more convenience and better personalization.
That's why we were excited to announce earlier this week the creation of a team that has oversight for the end-to-end customer experience under the leadership of our first Chief Customer Officer in McDonald's history, Manu Steijaert. Manu will oversee everything from the physical restaurants that we design and build to the digital experiences that we embed along each step of the customer journey. As we finished the global rollout of EOTF, Manu and his team will now be focused on what's next to drive a new layer of sustained growth for our system that leverages the foundations that we've built. For the past 18 months, our digital customer engagement, global marketing, data analytics and restaurant solutions teams have worked to standardize our infrastructure and align the system against some common frameworks. These efforts ultimately paved the way for MyMcDonald's Rewards, our first global digital offering that we are now deploying across our largest markets.
MyMcDonald's Rewards is just the first example of how we will lead as a digital innovator by leveraging our scale and engaging with our customers in a truly integrated way. Manu is the ideal choice to integrate these teams and take their work to the next level, with an intense focus on driving incomparable customer-centric innovation. He's been an important part of the McDonald's system for more than 20 years at every level. Manu knows these teams well and has an incredibly deep understanding of the needs of our customers, one rooted in his early experience as a crew member in his parent's McDonald's franchise in his native Belgium. We believe that connecting these teams will enable us to deliver the seamless omnichannel experience that our customers want and only McDonald's can provide, transforming the way customers connect with, interact with and experience our brand.
Further strengthening our ways of working to better serve our customers is one of many ways we're working to accelerate the Arches today. This complements the work underway to accelerate the Arches with investments in customer-centric creative marketing that only McDonald's can offer so fully. That marketing made a measurable impact in the second quarter with the global debut of our incredibly successful Famous Orders marketing platform. I'll have more to say about that a bit later. We're accelerating the Arches by committing to our core menu. We're tapping into customer demand for the familiar and making the chicken, burgers and coffee our customers love even more delicious. We're borrowing from what has worked well in other markets like the growing success of the McSpicy Chicken Sandwich. McSpicy launched in China over 20 years ago, and customers can now enjoy this great-tasting sandwich in multiple markets around the world. Late last year, we launched McSpicy in Australia as part of their new chicken sandwich lineup. And earlier this month, it debuted in the U.K. to great fanfare.
We also continue to leverage our familiar favorites and create new ones to make our menu even more craveable. In the U.S., the momentum from the successful launch of our Crispy Chicken Sandwich continued into the second quarter as we supported the platform with culturally relevant advertising, just one more way that our beloved core menu continues to drive growth while anchoring a customer experience that is second to none. We also know that the customer experience today reaches beyond the physical walls of our restaurants. And that's why we're accelerating the Arches to better serve our digitally connected customers. To give you a sense of the growing digital connection we have to our customers, we have the most downloaded QSR app in the United States. And earlier this month, we were proud to launch our new loyalty program, MyMcDonald's Rewards, in the U.S. The loyalty of every McDonald's fans has been unmatched for 65 years. And with these new digital connections, we're able to do an even better job of rewarding them for it.
We already have over 22 million active MyMcDonald's users in the U.S., with over 12 million enrolled in our new loyalty program, MyMcDonald's Rewards. And that's before national advertising for loyalty, which began earlier this week. Well, it is a good example of how our core menu and personalized marketing come together through digital channels to build a stronger relationship with our customers. Our digital system-wide sales across our top six markets were nearly $8 billion in the first half of 2021, a 70% increase versus last year. And that's why we're moving aggressively to bring MyMcDonald's Rewards to our top six markets. We currently have loyalty programs in place in France and the U.S. Germany and Canada plan to launch MyMcDonald's Rewards before the end of this year, followed by the U.K. and Australia in 2022. We're just as excited about our drive-thrus through which much of our business has come from this year and about delivery. Over 80% of our restaurants across 100 markets globally now offer delivery.
We're excited about our success with multiple 3PO partners. And as I said last quarter, we continue to innovate. Overall, our recent successes show that our M, C and D growth pillars working in concert can deliver unmatchable experiences for our customers and drive growth unlike anything else in customer retail. Of course, our work to accelerate the Arches is built on the foundation of the very core of McDonald's success: running great restaurants. As we open our dining rooms, return to regular hours and get back to full staffing, we know that world-class execution will be more important than ever. While the Delta variant has brought more stops and starts to the COVID story around the world, people are venturing out and establishing new routines. That includes a return to in-person dining. Today, about 70% of our dining rooms in the U.S. are open. By Labor Day, barring resurgences, it will be nearly 100%.
Internationally, the majority of our restaurants are now operating all channels, including dine-in, but many continue to operate with limited hours or restricted capacity. We're working hard to get back to normal. When our customers are ready to come back to dining in our restaurants, we will be more than ready and eager to welcome them. Not only are we more resilient today than we were heading into the pandemic. As Kevin will tell you, we are building from a position of strength.
Kevin?
