According to Wired, the fast food chain has reached an agreement to write a cheque for Dynamic Yield, a startup based in Tel Aviv that provides retailers with algorithmically driven "decision logic" technology.

It makes software which tells you what other customers bought when you are using your shopping cart. Dynamic Yield had been recently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; people familiar with the details of the McDonald’s offer put it at over $300 million.

So what does a burger giant want with an analytics firm?
McDonald’s serves around 68 million customers every single day. Many of those people never get out of their car, opting instead to place and pick up their orders at the drive-thru window.

The Dynamic Yield acquisition is not the start of a digital transformation, but a catalyst.

In a pilot program at a McDonald’s restaurant in Miami, powered by Dynamic Yield, displays create shedloads of data about a sales event including weather, time of day, local traffic, nearby events, and historical sales data, both at that specific franchise and around the world.

This allows customers to see what items have been popular at that location, and prompting them with potential upsells. A company that amasses as much data as McDonald’s will find no shortage of algorithmic avenues.