I sympathize with your viewpoint, having experienced McDonald's in India. My guess is that it doesn't pay to experiment and build a food culture - all the big companies can do is wait for a local success and then try to import it.
Food tastes vary a lot from person and place, so I do think it's very risky. To give you a successful example, poke bowls became popular in the urban US in the early 2010s, and reached my college town around 2015 or so? But my guess is that the locals don't eat there much, just the students. I think it's because people are less adventurous in aggregate than you might think, and the economics don't work out.
See McDonald's international menu, which is in my opinion kind of terrible. There must be something holding them back.
Yeah, the point about local tastes is very true. But consider delivery food: pizza and chinese are both very popular in the US, not because they're authentic or even good, but because some companies figured out a way to market themselves effectively. So, while tastes might not change overnight, it's certainly possible to create culture w/ clever marketing and pricing. That might potentially be a better bet for a food industry upstart than trying to negotiate w/ big chains and end up getting shut out because "economies of scale didn't pan out".
Even without creating culture, I think there are food items that big food companies could conceivably offer in a market like the US and still be relatively well accepted: chicken pot pie, pastas/lasagnas, crepes, fish and chips, are all things that americans are warm to and don't necessarily involve a huge slab of red meat as the core of the dish. One of those can even be made in a McD restaurant with existing ingredients today.
Food tastes vary a lot from person and place, so I do think it's very risky. To give you a successful example, poke bowls became popular in the urban US in the early 2010s, and reached my college town around 2015 or so? But my guess is that the locals don't eat there much, just the students. I think it's because people are less adventurous in aggregate than you might think, and the economics don't work out.
See McDonald's international menu, which is in my opinion kind of terrible. There must be something holding them back.