Jennifer Marston wrote . . . . . . . . .
Now that its apparent even contactless tech won’t bring back the glory days of the dining room, restaurant chains are on a tear to refit their existing stores to better serve to-go formats. Efforts run the gamut, from dumping the front of house altogether to geofencing the premises for faster pickup orders to building more drive-thru lanes.
Burger King just one-upped all those efforts. The decades-old burger chain has has compiled all of the above and then some into a whopper of a design prototype for future restaurants. Per a BK press release from this week, the new design — which hasn’t actually been implemented yet — is meant to serve multiple order and delivery formats and will be 60 percent smaller than a traditional BK location.
Burger King plans to accomplish that with the following:
- A drive-in area where customers scan a QR code then order and pay through the app. Food is delivered to the car.
- Curbside delivery and pickup lockers for customers who order ahead via the Burger King mobile app. The only element missing from this is geofencing tech for the curbside service, which other quick service restaurants are now using to speed up operations.
- On-premises service. No surprise that this will be a much smaller part of the overall plan moving forward. In one design, Burger King swapped out the traditional dining room for a covered patio. See below for the other option.
- Double- and triple-lane drive-thrus. There will also be a walkup window and a view of the kitchen inside.
Suspended kitchens and dining rooms are by far the most intriguing addition, and one we haven’t yet see from another quick service restaurant. The kitchen and dining room will hang above the drive-thru lane, cutting down on the restaurant’s overall physical footprint. For drive-thru guests, at least, orders are delivered via a conveyor belt system. This particular design also includes a dedicated drive-thru lane for delivery drivers and is, according to the press release, “a 100% touchless experience.”
The first real-life buildout of these designs will be in Miami and the Caribbean in 2021.
And while we wouldn’t expect other quick service restaurants to produce a carbon copy of the design, it does feel that Burger King has raised the bar in terms of both standards and innovation when it comes to reformatting the restaurant experience. Some of the elements, like curbside pickup, are already fully established formats across most quick service restaurants. Others, like triple drive-thru lanes, are more an anomaly. The hanging kitchen is, to the best of my knowledge, unheard of at any other quick service restaurant.
The design does raise some questions around what the company will expect of its franchisees. As we saw last year with McDonald’s, retrofitting stores is an expensive, sometimes frustrating endeavor for franchisees. If Burger King wants this wonder of the QSR world to set the new standard for restaurant chains, it will need to ensure new build outs and existing store updates are as pleasant an experience for franchisees as they seem poised to be for customers.
Source: The Spoon
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