At the risk of stating the obvious, COVID permanently changed the restaurant industry. Depending on the source, as many as 10% of all restaurants permanently closed their doors during 2020 and 2021, and we continue to see bankruptcies across all restaurant categories. Of course, it wasn’t just restaurant operations that were impacted, as consumers shifted their behavior and increasingly adopted mobile ordering, delivery, and drive-thru for orders. This shift also had an significant impact on restaurant design, with QSR chains exploring multiple drive-thru lane locations and fast-casual and casual-dining chains implementing pick up windows. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz previously discussed the importance of drive-thrus to their future growth plans, and we’ve also looked at the performance of Shake Shack’s drive-thru locations relative to their legacy locations which showed promising signs for the concept.
Not surprisingly, we’ve been watching Chick-fil-A’s new “elevated drive-thru” concept store in McDonough, GA, which opened last month. The restaurant features “four drive-thru lanes and an elevated kitchen with a unique meal transport system”, with no dining room or dine-in services. Customers can order ahead through the Chick-fil–A app and pick up their orders using the dedicated mobile order lanes; or they can place their orders through traditional drive-thru lanes. After ordering, employees prepare the food in the elevated kitchen, and a conveyor belt system moves the meal from the elevated kitchen above to a crew member on the ground below.
Chick-fil-A’s elevated drive thru store has been open for a little more than a month, so it’s hard to make any definitive conclusions. However, Chick-fil-A’s elevated drive-thru is reminiscent of Taco Bell’s “Defy” restaurant prototype, which opened in Brooklyn Park, MN in June 2022. This concept also featured an elevated kitchen and four drive-thru lanes.
The Taco Bell Defy prototype may give us a glimpse into what visit trends may look like for Chick-fil-A’s elevated drive-thru concept in the months ahead. Placer data indicates that Taco Bell Defy has averaged almost 25% greater visits than the chain average since June 2023, with almost 35% higher visits per location during the summer months (below). Our data also indicates that the Taco Bell Defy has 10% shorter dwell times than the chain average over the past twelve months.
If this format allows for 25% greater visits on roughly the same store footprint as a traditional restaurant, it could have meaningful unit economic implications across the restaurant category. Given the drive-thru innovations from Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and others, we thought we’d revisit visit per square foot metrics across QSR concepts. Below, we’ve included trailing-twelve-month visit per square foot data for 15 of the largest QSR chains that use drive-thrus at the majority of their locations. For a chain like Chick-fil-A that is already seeing strong visit per square foot trends, an elevated drive-thru model could unlock even greater efficiency, which could benefit store-level margins and cash flow. For some of the other chains on the list, the elevated drive-thru format could be a way to drive greater adoption of mobile apps, create buzz for their brands, and narrow the gap between them and the leading chains in the category. While an elevated drive-thru model will not work in every retail center–which is why we also continue to see automated make-line format stores from Chipotle and sweetgreen–the early data suggests that elevated drive-thru formats can play a more meaningful role in future QSR expansion plans.
