• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

Burger King, Popeye’s to Modernize Their Drive-Thrus With More Tech

by Jennifer Marston
October 27, 2020October 27, 2020Filed under:
  • Business of Food
  • Delivery & Commerce
  • Featured
  • Restaurant Tech
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Restaurant Brands International (RBI) announced today its plans to “modernize” the drive-thru at more than 10,000 Burger King and Tim Horton’s locations in North America by 2022. Additionally, a drive-thru modernization for Popeye’s, also owned by RBI, will kick off later this year. 

RBI first hinted at this development back in February. Most of the updates and changes are around the digital menu boards on display in drive-thru lanes. These menu boards will be equipped in the future with “predictive selling technology” built in-house that can learn consumer purchasing habits and make recommendations based on those as well as factors like current weather and traffic.

These new menu boards will also incorporate loyalty programs and contactless order/payment features, with the latter being developed in partnership with Verifone. The first prototype of this order/payment integration is currently testing at a Tim Horton’s location in Canada. An additional 15 locations are set to test it by January 2021. 

RBI notes that it already has a number of these newly revamped menu boards installed at its restaurant brand locations: 800 at Tim Horton’s locations in the U.S. in Canada and more than 1,500 at Burger King in the U.S. As noted above, Popeye’s will start to incorporate them into its drive-thru layout later this year.

Making menu boards more dynamic is just one way QSRs are modernizing their drive-thrus to make them faster, more efficient, and more contactless. That modernization, while broad in terms of real-world application, is necessary now that the pandemic has forced the restaurant biz to go off-premises. Drive-thru times are about 30 seconds slower right now than they were in 2019, a lag QSR Magazine says equates to lost revenue, typically around $64,182,668 annually per 2,000 stores. That’s a lag restaurant chains will have to fix in order to remain competitive, since the future of the dining room still hangs in the balance (because pandemic) and drive-thru sales can account for up to 70 percent of a chain’s overall sales.

Efforts from other restaurant companies of late include full-on pivots to drive-thru format from the likes of Shake Shack and Chipotle as the companies add more lanes and increase mobile order-ahead functionality for this format. KFC is exploring license plate-recognition technology, and of course there is McDonald’s Dynamic Yield technology that’s currently installed at thousands of the chain’s locations.

RBI actually has much more than menu boards up its sleeve when it comes to modernizing the drive-thru. The company recently showed off a Burger King prototype that features a conveyor belt system for delivering food to cars and a kitchen built over the drive-thru lanes. Undoubtedly, some of the ideas embedded in that prototype will make their way to other RBI brands and locations in the future.


Related

Burger King, Tim Hortons Aim for Faster Drive Thrus and More Personalized Tech in 2020

Restaurant Brands International (RBI), parent company of Burger King, Tim Horton’s, and Popeye’s, is doubling down on its efforts to modernize its brands and in doing so keep pace with competitors in the world of quick-service restaurants. On its earnings call this week, RBI’s CEO José Cil highlighted several milestones…

Chipotle Finally Launches Its Own Take on the Ghost Kitchen Concept

QSR brand Chipotle is a known leader in the restaurant industry’s current transition from dining room to off-premises formats, but the company has for the most part been quiet in the conversation around ghost kitchens. Up to now, that is. The company today revealed its Chipotle Digital Kitchen a pickup-…

Requiem for the Dining Room

Welcome to our weekly restaurant tech newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry. At one point most figured it would take about five to 10 years for off-premises to become the industry-wide norm in the restaurant biz and for QSRs to change…

Get the Spoon in your inbox

Just enter your email and we’ll take care of the rest:

Find us on some of these other platforms:

  • Apple Podcasts
  • Spotify
Tagged:
  • Burger King
  • contactless
  • drive-thru
  • popeyes
  • Restaurant Brands International
  • Tim Hortons

Post navigation

Previous Post Ordermark Raises $120M to Build More Virtual Restaurants
Next Post Kaffe Bueno Raises $1.3M to Turn Upcycled Coffee Product Into Functional Food

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Get The Spoon in Your Inbox

The Spoon Podcast Network!

Feed your mind! Subscribe to one of our podcasts!

How ReShape is Using AI to Accelerate Biotech Research
How Eva Goulbourne Turned Her ‘Party Trick’ Into a Career Building Sustainable Food Systems
Combustion Acquires Recipe App Crouton
Next-Gen Fridge Startup Tomorrow Shuts Down
From Starday to Shiru to Givaudan, AI Is Now Tablestakes Across the Food Value Chain

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.