How fast can fast food get?
The entire industry has shaved the average time elapsed between arriving at a drive-thru lane to receiving your food by almost 8%, or 29 seconds, according to a survey last year by QSR Magazine. Restaurant operators are innovating like mad to speed up their operations even more.
Taco Bell’s purple-neon, two-story “Defy” prototype in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, aims to get customers through the drive-thru in two minutes or less. The facility has separate drive-thru lanes for mobile customers, delivery drivers, and traditional orders, and delivers each order from a second-story kitchen via vertical lifts. In a test, QSR found Defy reduced customers’ total drive-thru time sharply to just a little under three minutes, compared with an industry average of 5 minutes 43 seconds.
McDonald’s has opened two highly automated stores, in Fort Worth, Texas, and Denver, where employees begin processing online orders before customers arrive and robots prepare and deliver them via a conveyor belt. Although automation isn’t a slam dunk, it reflects progress. Order-filling accuracy fell by 8%, but food delivery to customers rose by nearly 200 seconds.
Other chains are testing designs that combine drive-thru with speedy access to order pickups. Whataburger opened a digital kitchen last year that serves mobile and delivery customers with automated delivery through Apex smart lockers. Employees prepare the online order, place it in the locker, and move on to the next task. Jack in the Box and Del Taco operators are also trying automated stand-alone facilities with a pickup area just inside the building.
The risk in emphasizing speedy drive-thru and pick-up service, some industry experts say, is that restaurants are becoming giant vending machines. Visiting a fast-food restaurant has become more of a transaction than a dining experience.
Not all chains are removing the human touch. Chick-fil-A opened a two-story drive-thru restaurant in Atlanta with a capacity of 75 cars at a time, sheltered by a kitchen built overhead. But employees still collect orders from the kitchen and hand them to customers in person.
And so far, the industry’s quest for speed appears to be paying off. Visits to fast food and fast casual restaurants have risen fairly consistently through 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, outpacing the up-and-down traffic trends at full-service restaurants, according to Placer.ai. Their increasing speed of service may be giving fast food purveyors an edge.
