Henry Trickey, senior vice president of development and information technology at McDonald’s UK & Ireland, said the McDoanld’s to Go store is all about testing and learning. “It’s an exciting, but challenging time to be in the restaurant sector. Changing tastes, new technology and more competition mean we need to continue to focus on investing in what matters most to our customers. We know that ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ and that’s exactly why we are launching McDonald’s to Go – to allow us to trial different formats in different locations, depending on customer needs.”

Oftentimes, the most interesting McDonald’s Corp. experiments happen beyond the U.S. That’s certainly the case in Japan. Chicago-based McDonald’s Corp. recently revealed results from a new Happy Meal toy recycling program in Japan. From February to May, 2,900 restaurants in Japan collected 1.27 million toys, which were “reborn” into 100,000 trays, the company announced in late August. Japan plans to have a second recycling program during the school holidays later this year, the company said.

Japan, shown, isn’t the only international market experimenting with trays made of recycled material. In Norway, restaurants are producing serving trays made of marine plastic waste from the Nordland coast. The trays are made with plastic pellets from marine waste collected by local fishermen.  

“They’re nice and durable,” Kristina Johansen, a communications manager at McDonald’s Norway, said in statement. “And they work.”

The trays are found in several of Norway’s 73 McDonald’s restaurants.

The chain said this week that it has expanded its DoorDash delivery from 200 Houston-area restaurants to more than 10,000 restaurants in 50 states. McDonald’s Corp., which launched nationwide delivery with Uber Eats in 2017, said it will continue to use Uber Eats. However, the two companies ended the exclusive partnership earlier this summer when McDonald’s decided to add DoorDash as a second delivery partner to expand its delivery footprint.