Why There’s No McDonald’s in Kazakhstan (2026)

Kazakhstan is the second post-Soviet country I’ve had to write up as a “no McDonald’s, but used to” case for bigmacindex.app, and the structural parallels to Belarus and Russia are obvious enough that I have to be careful not to copy-paste the analysis. The trigger is the same — February 2022 — but the supply-chain mechanics, the ownership trajectory and the successor brand all look slightly different in each country.

Short version for Kazakhstan: McDonald’s operated 24 restaurants from March 2016 to January 2023, lost its only viable beef supplier when the Russia route collapsed, and exited. The same 24 buildings reopened first nameless, then briefly as “BizAshykpyz” and “We Are Open,” then in August 2023 as a real brand called I’m (“feel-good restaurants”). In mid-2026 I’m is still there, the Golden Arches are still not, and Food Solutions KZ — the operator — is still doing essentially the McDonald’s playbook with the trademarks filed off.

This piece is the working notes I made while deciding how to treat Kazakhstan in the 2026 index.

The short answer

McDonald’s was in Kazakhstan from March 8, 2016 (first restaurant at 49 Bogenbai Batyr Avenue, Astana — then called Nur-Sultan) until January 2023, when the master franchisee Food Solutions KZ formally terminated the licence after running out of usable beef. The chain reached 24 outlets in Astana, Almaty, Atyrau, Aktyubinsk, Kostanay and Karaganda before exit. The Economist has never tracked Kazakhstan in its Big Mac Index — so unlike Russia there is no historical Big Mac series to lose — but the country was a real, functional McDonald’s market for almost seven years, which is more than you can say for Belarus’s smaller, longer-running chain ever managed to be in PPP terms.

The replacement brand, I’m, runs the same buildings with a near-identical menu. Its closest Big Mac analog is the Double Big Burger at 2,690 KZT (~$5.52 USD at the June 22, 2026 rate of 487.59 KZT/USD). That’s a shadow data point, not a real Big Mac, and I treat it as such in the data file.

March 2016: the late opening

Kazakhstan’s McDonald’s launch was unusually late for a country of its size and oil wealth. By 2016, McDonald’s had been in Russia for 26 years, Belarus for 20, Ukraine for 19. The hold-up was supply-chain. McDonald’s standards require a tightly-controlled cold chain for beef patties, dairy and produce — and the company’s policy for Kazakhstan, from the start, was that the beef would come from its existing Russian supplier rather than be re-engineered for a small Kazakh market.

The first restaurant opened March 8, 2016, in Astana (then Nur-Sultan), at 49 Bogenbai Batyr Avenue, with the usual launch-day queue (Caspian News retrospective). Almaty and the other cities followed later in the buildout. The master franchise was held by Food Solutions KZ LLP, a company controlled by Kairat Boranbayev — a Kazakh businessman whose daughter was at the time married to Aisultan Nazarbayev, grandson of then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev. That family connection turns out to matter for what happens to the franchise later, in a way that is now fairly typical for post-2022 Kazakhstan.

By late 2022 the chain had grown to 24 restaurants across six cities. It was the kind of footprint that, in an alternate timeline where Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine, would probably have doubled by 2026.

The supply-chain problem was already structural

The thing to understand about McDonald’s Kazakhstan is that the beef question was a known fragility from day one. McDonald’s restaurants in Kazakhstan didn’t source patties locally; they imported them, frozen, from a Cremonini-operated hamburger plant in Odintsovo (Moscow region), with the associated slaughterhouse near Orenburg, Russia, that supplied the entire former-Soviet McDonald’s network (Bloomberg, Jan 2023; MEAT+POULTRY, Jan 2023). When McDonald’s Corporation announced its full Russia exit on May 16, 2022 (McDonald’s corporate statement), the Orenburg plant stopped being a legitimate McDonald’s supplier. That meant Kazakhstan had no patties.

For a brief period through mid-2022, Food Solutions KZ tried to keep the chain running on whatever frozen inventory remained and on rumoured grey-market shipments that may or may not have technically violated the McDonald’s supplier-of-record rules. By November 2022 the inventory was gone and the supply problem couldn’t be papered over any longer. On November 1, 2022 all 24 Kazakh restaurants closed “temporarily” (RFE/RL, Nov 2022). The Kazakh Agricultural Ministry publicly attributed the closure to “Western sanctions against Russia,” which was a politically convenient framing — the proximate cause was actually McDonald’s own decision to stop accepting Russia-sourced patties.

The CEO of Food Solutions KZ, Aset Mashanov, gave a more candid account in 2023 (dairynews.today, 2023): the main supplier had been Russia, after McDonald’s left Russia it “lost control over the supply chain,” and McDonald’s Corporation “made an unequivocal decision not to compromise and did not agree to further cooperation with Russian suppliers.” In other words: head office refused to greenlight an alternative cross-border arrangement, and Food Solutions couldn’t build a Kazakh patty supply chain fast enough to bridge the gap.

December 2022: the return that didn’t happen

There’s a December 2022 Eurasianet piece that I should flag here because it shows up in search results and is misleading if read without context. The headline says “McDonald’s poised for return to Kazakhstan.” The article reports comments Mashanov made on December 12, 2022 about “sourcing materials from far and near abroad” and exploring local Kazakh beef substitutes.

That return didn’t happen. By the time the article was published, the licence renegotiation had already failed in private. The “poised for return” framing reflects what Food Solutions was hoping for in mid-December; the actual outcome, six weeks later, was termination of the franchise agreement and a permanent rebrand. Anyone looking at that December headline today and inferring that McDonald’s came back to Kazakhstan would be wrong.

January 2023: the licence terminates

On January 22, 2023, Food Solutions KZ confirmed that the McDonald’s licence had been terminated and the restaurants would reopen under a different brand (kursiv.media, Jan 2023). The first locations reopened the same week, with all McDonald’s branding stripped from the buildings and the temporary signage reading “BizAshykpyz” (Kazakh for “We are open”) or just “We Are Open” in English.

For the next seven months — January to August 2023 — Kazakhstan had a chain of 24 effectively-nameless burger restaurants in the exact buildings where McDonald’s had been the previous November, serving food that was visibly modelled on the McDonald’s menu without using any McDonald’s product names or trademarks. This is the same legal-grey-zone interim pattern that played out in Belarus and Russia, though Russia closed it faster and Belarus dragged it out longer.

There was also a brief, separately interesting episode in early 2023 where Vkusno i tochka — Russia’s McDonald’s successor — explored expanding into Kazakhstan and taking over the Food Solutions outlets (Moscow Times, Jan 2023). That deal also didn’t happen. The geopolitical optics of letting a Russian-branded successor chain operate in a Central Asian country actively trying to distance itself from Russian post-war alignment would have been bad, and Food Solutions appears to have chosen the harder path of building its own brand instead.

August 2023: I’m launches

On August 17, 2023, at a presentation in Almaty, Aset Mashanov unveiled the permanent successor brand: I’m, with the tagline “feel-good restaurants” and a stylised apostrophe rendered as a small red heart (Interfax, Aug 2023; Qazmonitor, Aug 2023; Verdict Foodservice, Aug 2023). All 24 restaurants were rebranded across the second half of 2023. The new identity is more conscious of being its own thing than Belarus’s Mak.by, which leans into the “we used to be McDonald’s” association by using “Mak.” The Kazakh successor went the other direction — picking a name that doesn’t reference McDonald’s, mascots, or arches at all.

The menu nonetheless retains the McDonald’s silhouette: a flagship double-patty stack (the Double Big Burger), a single-patty equivalent (Big Burger), a chicken sandwich, a fish sandwich, nuggets, fries. The crew uniforms changed, the cup designs changed, but the kitchen workflow is recognisably the same one Food Solutions operated under the Golden Arches.

The Boranbayev problem

The McDonald’s exit overlapped with a separate, awkward chapter in the ownership story. Kairat Boranbayev was arrested on March 17, 2022 — roughly three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and about the same time McDonald’s started telling franchisees to expect supply disruption — on charges of large-scale embezzlement from QazaqGas (formerly KazTransGas), the state energy company (Eurasianet, 2023). His arrest was part of the broader 2022 reckoning with the Nazarbayev-era elite that followed the January 2022 “Bloody January” unrest and the consolidation of power by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

For McDonald’s Corporation, a master franchisee whose principal was facing serious criminal charges in his home country was already an uncomfortable situation. Supply-chain failure gave both sides a clean reason to terminate the relationship without having to address the politics. By the time I’m launched in August 2023, ownership of Food Solutions KZ had reportedly passed through restructuring; Boranbayev himself was sentenced in June 2024 to a custodial term and a multi-billion-tenge fine. The chain that operates the I’m restaurants today is functionally the same entity, but under different effective control.

Shadow product: I’m Double Big Burger

The closest Big Mac analog on the I’m menu in mid-2026 is the Double Big Burger: two beef patties, lettuce, cheese, sauce, sesame bun. It is positioned exactly where McDonald’s would position a Big Mac on its menu — as the hero double-stack item. The mid-2026 price is 2,690 KZT (Young Pioneer Tours I’m Burger menu).

At the June 22, 2026 official exchange rate of roughly 487.59 KZT per USD (National Bank of Kazakhstan; Trading Economics KZT), that’s about $5.52 USD. The single-patty Big Burger at 1,990 KZT comes out around $4.08 USD.

To set those numbers against tracked countries: $5.52 puts Kazakhstan’s shadow Big Mac roughly in line with Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 2026 — which feels about right for a major Central Asian oil exporter with an upper-middle-income GDP per capita and a relatively stable currency. It’s well above what you’d pay in Mexico or Indonesia, and well below the Eurozone average. The shadow data point makes intuitive sense, but I keep the confidence at 0.55 because (a) I’m is a single chain with no Big Mac SKU as such, and (b) menu prices on third-party tour sites are not the same as a verified receipt from the official app.

The Kazakh tenge in 2026

The tenge has been one of the better-behaved post-Soviet currencies through 2025-2026. After the 2022 spike (briefly to ~510 KZT/USD in the immediate aftermath of Russian sanctions, when Kazakhstan was sucked into Russian financial-system instability), the rate stabilised in the 440-490 range and has stayed there since (Trading Economics KZT chart). Year-to-date 2026 the tenge is actually up ~4% against the dollar.

There is no meaningful parallel-market rate to worry about — unlike Iran or pre-2024 Argentina. The official National Bank rate is what retail transactions clear at, so the USD conversion of the I’m Double Big Burger price is a fair signal rather than a distorted one. That’s why I’m comfortable publishing a single-figure USD shadow price for Kazakhstan even though the underlying SKU isn’t a Big Mac.

What this means for the Big Mac Index

Kazakhstan never appeared in the Economist’s Big Mac Index, so there’s no historical series to lose. What the country offers is a shadow data point of moderate quality: a successor chain operating on McDonald’s former infrastructure, with a known double-patty hero burger SKU at a knowable KZT price, in a currency with a transparent official rate.

The signal is narrower than what we get for Russia (where Vkusno i tochka has ~900 stores) or Bolivia (where Burger King fills the gap with a recognisably global brand). It’s broader than what we get for Iran (Mash Donald’s is bootleg, not licensed). For someone trying to triangulate Central Asian retail PPP, I’m in Almaty is the best fast-food anchor available, and ignoring it makes the regional picture sparser than it needs to be.

For the broader framework around how shadow data is treated alongside official Economist tracking, see the bigmacindex.app methodology page and the Why PPP fails writeup.

FAQ

Is there any McDonald’s restaurant operating in Kazakhstan in 2026? No. There has been no McDonald’s-branded restaurant in Kazakhstan since January 2023. The 24 former locations operate as I’m restaurants under Food Solutions KZ. There is no public roadmap for McDonald’s return.

Is I’m just McDonald’s with a different sign? Functionally close, legally not. I’m is an independent brand owned and operated by Food Solutions KZ. It uses the former McDonald’s buildings and a clearly McDonald’s-derived menu architecture, but the trademarks, recipes-of-record and supplier contracts are all I’m’s own. The kitchen workflow and crew DNA are inherited from the McDonald’s era.

Why didn’t McDonald’s just source beef from Kazakhstan itself? McDonald’s has done that in other markets (Russia’s domestic beef supply was built up over decades), but it takes years of cattle, abattoir and cold-chain investment to bring a country up to McDonald’s spec. The 2022 supply gap opened in months. Food Solutions and McDonald’s Corporation reportedly discussed Kazakh and other Central Asian sourcing options, but the timeline and capital cost didn’t work.

Could Vkusno i tochka still expand into Kazakhstan? Theoretically possible — Vkusno i tochka publicly explored Kazakh expansion in January 2023 — but practically very unlikely as of 2026. The Kazakh government has actively distanced itself from Russian-branded consumer operations in the post-2022 environment, and Food Solutions KZ has its own brand running on the same real estate. A Russian-flagged competitor would face both regulatory and consumer-sentiment friction.

How does the I’m price compare to what a Big Mac would cost if McDonald’s came back? Probably very close. If McDonald’s reopened in Almaty in 2026 it would face the same Kazakh labour costs, the same Kazakh rent, and presumably similar (now Kazakh-sourced) beef costs as I’m. The Double Big Burger at ~$5.52 is a reasonable estimate for where a 2026 Almaty Big Mac would sit. Whether that ever happens depends entirely on McDonald’s Corporation’s willingness to re-enter a small market that it has already burned its supply-chain bridges with once.

Sources used in this article

For the closest sister cases on this site, see Belarus (same 2022 sanctions cluster, different ownership ending) and Russia (the trigger market). For other never-opened Central Asian neighbours, see Turkmenistan and Mongolia.

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