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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

McDonalds

Is McDonalds Canada Making a Huge Mistake Naming Its New Plant-Based Burger ‘The PLT’?

Yesterday McDonald’s announced that select locations in Canada would be testing a new plant-based burger called the PLT (Plant, Lettuce, Tomato) made with a Beyond Meat patty.

The move makes a lot of sense from a trend perspective. My question is: What’s with the name?

First of all, McDonald’s chose to make an entirely new plant-based offering, instead of introducing an alternative to, say, a Big Mac. That’s a totally different approach than competitors like Burger King and Carl’s Jr., who debuted the plant-based Impossible Whopper and Beyond Famous Star Burger, respectively, based off of their most popular sandwiches.

The choice to introduce a totally new product could speak to McDonald’s hesitation to dive headfirst into the alternative meat trend — a perspective that was voiced by CEO Steve Easterbrook to CNBC earlier this year. By launching an entirely separate product they don’t risk alienating any consumers who are wary of the idea of eating an alt-meat burger and might be put off by the concept of Big Macs going vegetarian.

The bigger issue, at least in my mind, is the use of “plant.” I started thinking about this after reading a tweet from Matt Hayek, an NYU Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies.

There’s a reason that other fast-food companies aren’t including the world “plant” in their alt-meat menu offerings: it situates the product as something other than “meat.” If McDonald’s is trying to appeal to flexitarians — that is, folks that are trying to reduce their animal consumption but don’t want to go full-on vegetarian or vegan — that could be offputting.

I’m also a little unclear about the decision to call the new McDonald’s offering the “PLT.” To me, PLT –> BLT — that is, Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato. But there’s no bacon, plant-based or otherwise, involved in the product. That could be a source of confusion for consumers who see the PLT on menus, in-store or online, and are surprised when the burger shows op sans bacon.

Perhaps most interestingly, McDonald’s Canada doesn’t use the word “Beyond” or even “burger” anywhere in the name, which I think is a missed opportunity. By contact, ‘The Impossible Whopper’ is able to take advantage of Impossible’s brand recognition to draw in consumers who may have heard about the plant-based patties from the news, or even tried them elsewhere. ‘PLT’ could feature any old plant-based patty, or even just be a bunch of plants piled on a bun.

In short, it’s huge news that McDonald’s is experimenting with a plant-based burger in Canada, so close to the U.S. But they seem to be doing it in a way that sets themselves up for failure — or at least not in a way that would attract the maximum amount of new consumers, flexitarian and otherwise.

The PLT pilot will begin on September 30th in select McDonald’s locations in Ontario, Canada. Soon enough we’ll be able to see if McDonald’s is shooting itself in the foot with the name, or if consumers are eager enough to try plant-based options that they’ll look past an odd name and try the PLT anyway.

McDonald’s Is Launching a Beyond Burger in Canada

McDonald’s announced today it will conduct a 12-week test in Canada of its new plant-based burger made with Beyond Meat.

Dubbed the “P.L.T” — Plant, Lettuce, Tomato — the meatless burger will debut in 28 restaurants in Southwestern Ontario on September 30, according to a press release.

It seems McDonald’s is also taking pains to recreate the chain’s signature taste. The chain didn’t specify how exactly it has done that with the Beyond patty, just that the P.L.T. has been “crafted exclusively by McDonald’s” to “deliver the iconic taste” of the brand. The sandwich will be available for $6.49 CAD (a little under $5 USD).

The P.L.T. also looks to be an entirely new menu offering. In other words, McDonald’s isn’t trying to create a plant-based version of its most famous item, the Big Mac, the way Burger King has done with the Impossible Whopper.

What McDonald’s is clearly trying to do is thoroughly test the market for plant-based meat before committing to any widespread release of a plant-based product. In May, the chain said it was monitoring plant-based meat options but had no plans to share at that time. However, the chain now has a plant-based burger from Nestle on menus in both Germany and Israel.

The release of the P.L.T. in Canada brings McDonald’s plant-based strategy a little closer to home, and gives us a hint of what might show up on menus in the U.S. before the end of the year. While nothing is officially confirmed for the States yet, the new P.L.T. in Canada suggests McDonald’s will soon join Carl’s Jr., A&W, Del Taco, and other QSRs on Team Beyond in the race for plant-based burger dominance.

Newsletter: The Drive Thru Matters More Than Ever. So Do Farm Bots and Decaf Coffee

From self-service kiosks to mobile apps to dedicated pickup shelves and portals, there’s no end to new tech trying to speed up the order-pay-collect process for customers at QSRs.

But if the last week has made anything clear, it’s that while those pieces certainly play a role in the future of the restaurant, the drive thru is still the most important area of growth — at least for fast-food. Even as Minneapolis tries to ban drive thrus, companies are pumping enormous amounts of money and energy into improving this area, most notably with last week’s news that McDonald’s, king of all QSRs, had acquired voice-tech company Apprente. It’s the second acquisition Mickey D’s has made in 2019 of a technology company whose offerings can speed up lagging drive-thru lines and move more customers in less time. In March, the mega chain acquired a company called Dynamic Yield and has since installed its AI tech in thousands of McDonald’s drive thrus to make the order experience more personalized for customers.

Others aren’t sitting still. In 2019 alone, Dunkin’ has expanded its “Next Generation” store, which features dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile orders, to other parts of the U.S.; KFC started testing a drive-thru-only concept in Australia; and a slew of new tech companies have emerged offering various digital and AI-powered tools to take orders at the drive thru.

It’s not hard to understand why. As of last check, drive thrus still make up over 50 percent (in some cases closer to two thirds) of all orders for many QSRs. At the same time, bigger menus and more disjointed pieces of tech in the restaurant space have slowed down the order process and made wait times in drive-thru lanes longer. As Apprente CEO Itamar Arel, Ph.D., said back in 2018, “Fast food is not always fast and bottlenecks at ordering stations result in lost sales.” McDonald’s and others can’t afford those lost sales, so anything — whether an extra lane or a full-on tech makeover — to move people through the line faster could give QSRs an edge in the rising competition. You can bet there will be plenty more news from the drive-thru lane as more major QSRs revamp to take a page from McDonald’s playbook and reinvent themselves with tech.

Weeding Out the Labor Shortage Problem
The drive-thru isn’t the only area the food world is looking to speed up production. This week a company called FarmWise raised $14.5 million for its self-driving robots that remove weeds from crops without the need for herbicides or pesticides. (We expect these machines will be able to do much more than pull weeds in future, too.)

For the agtech world, machines like these not only save time, they also pick up the slack left by a major labor shortage in farm production. Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. say this labor shortage is the most limiting factor they face on their farms, and it’s not one that looks like it’ll be solved any time soon.

Hence, the robots. Every farm in America won’t have autonomous bots to pick weeds and harvest produce at the snap of a finger, but these machines are an increasingly appealing solution to the labor issue. Robots don’t need breaks, can work in sweltering heat and humidity, and in some cases can work faster than a human. As we look to solutions for both farm labor and wasted crops on the farm, these bots hold many possibilities.

Photo: Decafino

Disrupting Decaf
Meanwhile, someone wants to reinvent decaf coffee.

Decafino, a startup based out of Seattle, launched a Kickstarter campaign today for a tea bag-like product it claims can remove caffeine from any cup of brewed coffee. As my colleague Catherine Lamb detailed, the biodegradable pouch can be dropped in a cup of coffee (or caffeinated soda, for that matter), and within three to four minutes will remove the caffeine from the beverage.

If the product does as it claims, it could open up many more options for decaf coffee drinkers, who often face very limited selections at stores and coffee shops, and in some cases no options at all.

Personally, I’d have to be told I needed triple bypass surgery to stop drinking caffeinated coffee, and no doubt that day will come. In the meantime, there are plenty of folks out there who love the taste of coffee but for health reasons cannot drink the real thing. If Decafino is successful, these people might find a whole new world of drink choices.

McDonald’s Acquires Voice Ordering Tech Startup Apprente, Will Form New Tech Lab

McDonald’s announced today that it will acquire Apprente to bolster the fast food giants voice-based ordering capabilities. This is the second tech startup acquisition for Mickey D’s this year, and the Apprente team will form the basis of a new tech lab for the chain.

In the press announcement, McDonald’s described Apprente and how it will use the startup’s technology:

Apprente was founded in 2017 in Mountain View, California, to create voice-based platforms for complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering. In McDonald’s restaurants, this technology is expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking at the Drive Thru with future potential to incorporate into mobile ordering and kiosks.

The Apprente acquisition is part of McDonald’s ongoing evolution into more of a tech company. Back in March of this year, McDonald’s acquired personalization platform Dynamic Yield for $300 million to make its menus more Netflix-y with recommendations based on factors like the weather or current purchases. That technology is now deployed into more than 8.000 McDonald’s locations. Additionally, the chain was reported in June that McDonald’s was experimenting with robot-powered deep fryers and voice-activated technology at its drive thrus.

Major QSRs see over half their orders come via the drive thru, so it’s no surprise that area of fast food is a hotbed of tech activity. Both Clinc and Valyant AI are working on their own voice-tech solutions, and 5thru uses AI to that involves scanning a customer’s license plate. And while McDonald’s has certainly made the biggest strides of all QSRs in terms of adding tech to the drive-thru experience, others, including KFC and Dunkin’, are also experimenting with ways to speed up order times and upsell more customers.

Seeing this type of competition is most likely spurring McDonald’s decision to ramp up its own tech efforts internally. As such, the company also announced today that the Apprente team will be the founding member of a new group within McDonald’s Global Technology team called the McD Tech Labs based in Silicon Valley. The new lab will be going on a hiring spree to bring on engineers, data scientists and other technology related positions.

McDonald’s Partners With Grubhub, Expands Delivery to NYC and Tri-State Area

McDonald’s struck a major deal with Grubhub this week to expand the burger mega-chain’s McDelivery program in the NYC and Tri-State areas.

McDonald’s ended its exclusive delivery partnership with Uber Eats earlier this year. Then, in July, it added DoorDash to its roster to expand McDelivery further across the U.S. Among third-party delivery services, DoorDash currently holds the number one spot in terms of market share.

But Grubhub is still the top service in NYC and many other parts of the Northeastern U.S., including Boston and Philadelphia. Mired in controversy it maybe be, it’s still McDonald’s best bet when it comes to expanding delivery to as many locations as possible in that part of the country.

In the press release, McDonald’s said the Grubhub-Seamless partnership will expand delivery to 500 locations in the NYC and Tri-State areas, while overall delivery is expected to be a $4 billion business for the company in 2019. As is becoming the norm with major delivery partnerships, Grubhub will integrate its service directly into the McDonald’s POS system to streamline and speed up orders. McDonald’s did not say when exactly the new delivery program will become available.

The aggressive delivery expansion is part of McDonald’s push to transform all of its locations into “Experience of the Future” stores, which emphasize tech initiatives like self-order kiosks, mobile ordering and payments, and AI powering the drive-thru. And, of course, delivery.

Grubhub, meanwhile, has been building more of a presence in the rest of the country. In August, the service announced nationwide delivery with Shake Shack as well as a partnership with Dine Brands, who owns Applebee’s and IHOP restaurants.

What Sweden’s Quirky Food Tech Scene Could Mean for the Rest of the World

From parental leave policies to sustainability initiatives, Sweden is typically considered one of the most forward-thinking nations on earth.So it’s no surprise the country consistently pops up in food tech conversations, often for unusual projects that seem quirky at first glance but can actually tell us a lot about how tech is changing the way we eat.

Like making customers do what’s essentially a blind taste-test to see if they can tell the difference between a plant-based burger and the real deal. The famed Impossible Burger isn’t available in Europe right now, but that didn’t stop Burger King from using Vivera’s plant-based patty to create a version of its Whopper — and betting customers can’t discern the difference between it and a regular meat-based one.

To drive that point home, BK in Sweden launched the “50/50 menu” at the beginning of July where customers order BK’s signature burger and have a 50/50 chance of getting a meat version or the plant-based version. The only way to tell which is which is to scan a QR code on the wrapper.

It’s a gimmick, to be sure, but as my colleague Catherine Lamb pointed out, it’s also a way to get better data on plant-based offerings: “It will get a record of every consumer’s reaction to the sandwiches, and be able to quantify how often people are actually duped by the vegetarian alternatives.”

More data like this could give Burger King a realistic picture of how much customers actually want plant-based fast food — a useful lesson for businesses in any part of the world.

Or you could just hand your customers a picnic blanket. That’s what McDonald’s in Sweden did earlier this summer to promote its initiatives around delivering to public spaces via geofencing technologies. Customers scan a QR code on the picnic blanket to shoot their geographic information to a third-party delivery service, who will deliver a McDonald’s meal from the chain’s nearest location.

The idea isn’t specific to Sweden: companies like Domino’s and 7-Eleven also deliver to public locations rather than a numbered addresses. But there’s something more attention-grabbing about scanning a picnic blanket than simply logging into an app. PR stunt though it may be, it suggests a whole new avenue of possibilities when it comes to using everyday objects and settings in life to ramp up the food delivery business.

On a more ambitious level, come September 3, restaurant-goers in Stockholm will be able to experience what science, technology, academic research, design, and cooking look like when bundled together to form a single sustainable restaurant.

Restauranglabbet (“the restaurant lab”) will test numerous sustainability measures under one roof, from curbing food waste to cooking with more local, sustainable ingredients to measuring carbon footprint and using only eco-friendly materials in furniture design and production.

We won’t know how successful the project is until Restauranglabbet’s doors open on September 3, but no doubt there will be pieces of restaurant innovation coming out of the lab the whole world should take note of.

Elsewhere, a company in Stockholm called Diaz & Swahn is experimenting inside and outside the restaurant with how sound can affect the way food tastes to people. And a company called Local Food Node makes a digital platform that allows users to connect with local food producers by creating nodes that function as delivery and pickup spots for the food.

Will we be seeing QR-enabled picnic loot and sound-centric restaurants in the States anytime soon? Probably in part, particularly when it comes to building a more sustainable restaurant and finding new avenues for food delivery. In any case, keep your eye on Sweden one to watch for finding more innovative, scalable ways to integrate tech meaningfully into our food lives.

McDonald’s Adds DoorDash as Delivery Partner, Ends Uber Eats Exclusivity Deal

In what’s a bad news Uber Eats but a major win for DoorDash, McDonald’s announced today it has partnered with the latter to expand delivery in the U.S. This officially puts an end to McDonald’s exclusive partnership with Uber Eats, which the quick-service mega-chain had in place since 2017.

According to a press release, McDonald’s and DoorDash will launch the partnership with a pilot at more than 200 locations in the Houston, TX area. That’s slated to kick off on July 29. For those using DashPass, DoorDash’s monthly subscription service, McDonald’s will waive the delivery fee for orders of $12 or more.

It’s a surprising twist, said no one ever. The Uber Eats-McDonald’s exclusive deal technically ended in April of this year, just before Uber IPO’d. While that deal made delivery possible at about 64 percent of McDonald’s locations in the U.S., it seemed like only a matter of time before McDonald’s pulled the plug on the exclusivity factor in order to widen its ability to deliver to new markets. (The exclusive partnership was also a point of friction with some of the chain’s franchise operators.)

As a partner, DoorDash is a no-brainer, since the delivery service operates in all 50 U.S. states and, as I seem to be writing ad infinitum these days, is aggressively going after every suburban market in America.

Chris Kempczinski, President of McDonald’s USA, indicated as much in a statement in the press announcement: “Building on the success of McDelivery in the US, we’re excited to make McDelivery accessible to customers on DoorDash, which is available in all 50 states and reaches 80% of Americans, making it even more convenient for our customers to enjoy their favorite McDonald’s menu items on their terms.”

On the restaurant-tech front, two parties have integrated their systems so that DoorDash orders go directly to the McDonald’s POS system, speeding up the order process and (hopefully) making life easier for franchisees and employees working with the platform.

One area the press release didn’t mention but that’s worth keeping an eye on when it comes to McDonald’s news: artificial intelligence. McDonald’s acquired Dynamic Yield earlier this year, and has since implemented its AI tech in drive thrus, with plans to expand that program to kiosks. And not long ago, word got out that McDonald’s has actually been testing deep-frying robots to automated beverage equipment. It’s probably only a matter of time before AI makes its way to delivery, and something like a McDonald’s-DoorDash-Dynamic Yield delivery platform that can improve recommendations and personalize menus for customers doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

McDonald’s is Testing Kitchen Robots and AI-Powered Drive-Thrus. It’s About Time

Last week the Wall Street Journal broke the story that McDonald’s is testing robotic deep fryers and voice-activated drive-thrus at a location in suburban Chicago.

The story didn’t lay out a ton of details. We don’t know what the robotic fryer will look like — whether it’s akin to Miso Robotic’s Flippy, which fries tater tots with an articulating arm, or if it’s more of an automated basket that dips and raises from hot oil. Likewise, all we know about the new drive-thru tech is that it’s a type of voice recognition technology.

But even with those question marks, this is a huge step forward for automation in fast-food. It’s also an inevitable one, since the success of the QSR is predicated on making consistent food at a fast pace. I’m hard-pressed to find a task that robots are more suited for.

The WSJ pointed out that these innovations are part of McDonald’s efforts to quicken the chain’s pace of service to help it edge out fast-food competition. That’s certainly true, but there are numerous other benefits as well. Automating dangerous jobs like frying could lead to fewer employee injuries. In addition to being potentially life-threatening, these injuries can also have a high cost for the restaurant.

As far as the drive-thru goes, adding voice recognition technology can help McDonald’s streamline the drive-thru experience, cutting down on ever-lengthening wait times. It could also pair up with Dynamic Yield, the AI-powered personalization platform that McDonald’s acquired a few months ago, to access customer’s past orders, preferences, and dietary restrictions to better upsell them on targeted add-ons.

Of course there will still be kinks to work out. Voice technology isn’t perfect, and robot fryers still need human employees to help them do things like bag orders. McDonald’s is also already getting blowback from skeptics who worry that automation will take valuable jobs away from humans.

However, speakers at our ArticulATE conference this April pointed out that there’s a growing labor crisis in the restaurant industry. QSR’s especially are struggling to find people to do the more repetitive, boring and dangerous tasks — like frying nuggets and taking orders for hours at a time.

McDonald’s isn’t the first restaurant to try out cooking robots or voice ordering technology. However, it’s by far the largest. It’s hard to argue against the fact that automation in food-service, as with any industry, was always going to happen eventually. But once a giant like McDonald’s starts putting the automation wheels in motion, eventually starts to look a whole lot sooner.

Dunkin’ Is Testing Delivery, Geofencing in New York City

Dunkin’ announced this morning it is now available for delivery in all five boroughs of New York City.

Dunkin’ is already in select cities in the U.S. through partnerships with Grubhub as well as DoorDash. For the NYC test market, Dunkin’ will be available exclusively through Grubhub and Seamless (Grubhub’s NYC-specific brand).

Grubhub isn’t a surprising choice here. In major urban areas — like NYC, LA, Philadephia, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — the company is still the leader of third-party delivery when it comes to market share.

For the Dunkin’-NYC partnership, Grubhub will integrate orders directly into each store location’s POS system, a feature that’s getting more and more important with each new delivery partnership that surfaces.

But Grubhub didn’t stop there in terms of using technology to enhance the Dunkin’ deal. It also drew a geofence around each Dunkin’ location in NYC (there are over 400) in order to monitor traffic in surrounding areas and where couriers are in relation to the store making their order.

Seth Priebatsch, the head of enterprise at Grubhub, referred to this as “our ‘just in time delivery flow’” when he spoke to NRN this morning. Thanks to the technology, Dunkin’ will start a delivery order based on how far away the courier is and how large the order is. For bigger orders, Dunkin’ starts making an them when the courier is 10 minutes away; for smaller orders, the store will probably need just a few minutes to time an order with a courier’s arrival.

This geofencing method is something we’ll see more of as restaurant chains look to improve both timeliness and quality of their delivery orders. And Dunkin’ isn’t the first — McDonald’s already uses it, and Burger King pulled a well-publicized geofencing stunt late last year that wound up highlighting the value of the technology when it comes to attracting and retaining customers.

Packaging is the other aspect of the Dunkin’-Grubhub deal that bears noting. Grubhub said all couriers are equipped with insulated bags with which to deliver drinks, whether hot or cold. But it seems time and temperature are still the two major hurdles when it comes to coffee delivery, even for a chain as large as Dunkin’ (or, for that matter, Starbucks and Uber Eats). Even Priebatsch noted that Dunkin’ is currently trying to walk the line between serving a large delivery radius without making travelers go so far that the quality of the product gets diminished in the process.

While there was no news of Grubhub using anything beyond the standard insulated bag, packaging seems an areas ripe for disruption in food delivery, especially as as more and more goods like hot coffee and frozen smoothies go mobile.

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Partners With Postmates for Delivery

Today, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf announced and kicked off an exclusive delivery partnership with Postmates at 180 company-owned Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf locations across California and Arizona. According to a press announcement, additional locations around the U.S. are planned “in the coming weeks.”

Delivery fees on orders start at $1.99. For customers of Postmates Unlimited, the company’s subscription service, the delivery fee is waived on orders over $15.

Southern California-based Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf joins a growing list of coffee retailers now delivering, usually via third-party services.

Starbucks already operates a delivery program via Uber Eats in certain U.S. markets. If you prefer the McCafe brand for your early-morning coffee needs, McDonald’s will deliver one through Uber Eats (though it recently bailed on its exclusivity contract with the service). Dunkin’, meanwhile, has been testing delivery since 2015.

Coffee has always been a bit of a tricky delivery item, largely because it’s historically been a hot, highly spill-able beverage. As one writer noted back in 2016, “Time and temperature seem to be the two biggest obstacles [to delivery] in repeating the experiences consumers have come to expect within the brick-and-mortar retail locations.”

Those were the days when ordering coffee for delivery meant getting a tepid drink wrapped three times over in cellophane. But times are changing. More and more tech around delivery operations and logistics has entered the restaurant industry over the last few years, as have business models like ghost kitchens, which typically only service delivery and could therefore speed up order fulfillment times. Starbucks, in fact, just announced it is testing ghost kitchens in China that could improve quality and timeliness on orders.

Plus, according to the National Coffee Association’s latest report, so-called non-traditional beverages like blended drinks, cold brew, and nitro coffee are on the rise, thanks to a higher demand for personalization and specialization from younger customers. Many (though not all) of these beverages are better suited to car trips than the old-fashioned cup of joe.

As drinks like these become more popular, and as technology gets cheaper and easier for restaurants to implement and the industry continues to innovate on packaging, tepid coffee in a paper cup could soon become a thing of the past.

Wendy’s Doubles-Down on Its Tech Ambitions Post Earnings Call

If there’s one big takeaway to glean from Wendy’s first-quarter 2019 earnings call, which took place on Wednesday, it’s that the quick-service burger chain is ramping up its tech game in a big way.

Not that the Dublin, OH-based company was slacking. Prior to Wednesday’s call, Wendy’s had already installed self-serve kiosks in about 75 percent of its (North American) stores, accelerated its delivery program with DoorDash, and made progress on redesigning existing stores to better serve the digital needs QSRs in 2019 must meet.

Based on the transcript from this week’s earnings call, those initiatives have so far paid off. CEO Todd Penegor noted on the call that Wendy’s saw “system-wide sales growth” and that the company continues “to make meaningful progress with [its] consumer-facing digital capabilities.”

That progress includes further expansion of its delivery program, which Penegor said “continues to pace ahead of expectations.” The company plans to have 80 percent of its North American system available for delivery by the end of 2019, along with a more streamlined mobile app that will integrate DoorDash and make off-premise ordering an easier experience for customers. Mobile ordering will be available across the North American Wendy’s market by the end fo the year. (It currently operates in 75 percent of North America.)

A newer initiative for Wendy’s is the introduction of digital scanners, which are part of Wendy’s $25 billion investment in digital initiatives. Penegor said on the call the company plans to have scanners in all its restaurants by the end of 2019. Speed is the obvious benefit here, as the technology will allow employees to simply scan mobile coupons on orders, rather than keying them into a POS system, as was done previously.

For a QSR, however, providing speed at scale is almost important as the quick turnaround times themselves. Penegor said as much on the call, going as far as to say that scale “allows you to make investments in such things as enhanced training and tools, and that those with scale will ultimately win.”

Wendy’s celebrated its 50th birthday this year, but in terms of digital adoption, it has moved slower than McDonald’s, whose aggressive “experience of the future” redesign and foray into personalized recommendations have garnered much attention of late. That said, so has its ongoing battle with its franchisees, for whom all this new technology is sometimes more of an albatross around the neck than a revenue generator.

Wendy’s hasn’t reported any such friction as yet, so it will be important to keep an eye on the company as it scales its tech plans across the continent. They may not have a Dynamic Yield-like deal in the works yet (that we know of), but they could be creating a solid blueprint for growth worth mimicking in future.

Dunkin Donuts

Dunkin’ Is Taking Its Next-Generation Store to Texas and Beyond

Dunkin’ announced today a sizable expansion for 50 new locations outside the Northeast, the chain’s home region and where it’s historically held stores. The expansions will include elements of the chain’s next-generation store, which caters to mobile ordering, more modern design, and more espresso drinks.

In a press release, Dunkin’ said the new locations are part of an ongoing plan to open 200 to 250 new restaurants each year over the next three years. For this round, the company will head to Texas, Michigan, Southern Kentucky, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, and Missouri.

Notably, many of the planned expansions are with longtime franchisee groups. Even more notable is that with these deals, Dunkin’ will offer “flexible concepts for any real estate format,” according to the press release. Given that one-size-fits-all store redesign formats has been a point of friction for other restaurants (hello, McDonald’s), this flexibility could be a more rewarding way to go about expanding and redesigning.

Dunkin’s already made it clear to the world it’s trying to compete with other coffee-beverage brands (Starbucks, McDonald’s) with its next-gen concept store, which it launched at the beginning of 2018 in its hometown of Quincy, MA. The store, which has since made its way to other areas in the North, offers dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile orders, on-tap (coffee) beverages, and delivery options with third-party companies like Grubhub.

Grant Benson, CFE, senior vice president of franchising and business development, indicated in the press release that new locations will offer those features, and that Dunkin plans to “capitalize on the momentum we experienced in 2018.”

That momentum is evident: same-store sales at Dunkin’ were up 2.4 percent in the first quarter of 2019, and CEO David Hoffman said this was the largest quarterly same-store sales gain in four years. He also noted it was the result of “technology advancements” (and espresso drinks).

Dunkin’ isn’t a totally foreign presence outside the Northeast; outposts like Dunkin’ Express are becoming more and more common at places like highway truck stops. But those are basically drip coffee and donut stations within an existing convenience store, and would only go so far when competing with the likes of Starbucks or McDonald’s. Expanding not just full-service locations but features of its next-generation concept would help give Dunkin’ a greater presence coast to coast, something it’s going to need if it wants to stay relevant.

What would really up the competition would be for Dunkin’ to adopt an AI strategy like the one McDonald’s just did when it acquired Dynamic Yield. While there’s no indication that such a deal is in the works, or even if AI is going to be that much of a competitive differentiator, it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibilities as Dunkin’s next move.