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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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McDonald’s Drive-Thru Plans Need to Factor In Franchisees

The big to-do in the drive-thru lane of late is news that McDonald’s is testing automated ordering at 10 locations in Chicago, Illinois. 

The tech is based on an acquisition McDonald’s made in 2019 of voice-tech company Apprente. Through it, intelligent systems, rather than human beings, take the drive-thru customer’s order and send it to the kitchen for fulfillment. At an investor conference last week, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the company is seeing 85 percent accuracy on orders, with only about 20 percent of orders across the 10 stores requiring human intervention.

While Kempczinski is confident we’ll see voice-ordering at all McDonald’s drive-thrus in the next five years, he added that consumers shouldn’t expect to see it widespread as soon as next year. “There is a big leap between going from 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S. with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — I mean, on and on and on and on,” he said at the conference.

Separate from the technical feats the system must accomplish, there is also a huge number of franchisees to consider in the process of a wide-scale implementation. There are currently 38,000 McDonald’s operating across roughly 115 countries. The majority — 93 percent — are franchisees. Getting them onboard may be no small feat, either.

Disputes over technology have created tension between McDonald’s and its franchisees for years now — going all the way back to when some franchisees argued against having to offer Uber Eats to customers. The latest disagreement between the two groups concerns a $423-per-month fee corporate has been charging franchisees to cover a $70 million lag in outstanding technology fees. The National Owners Association (NOA), a group of McDonald’s franchises that formed a few years back, has gone as far as suggesting it create a technology cooperative to give owners more control over technology-related decisions. Ernst & Young is currently conducting a third-party audit of the fees in question.

All of which is to say, now may not be a great time to attempt a major rollout of what will probably be a costly system. How costly voice ordering will be for franchisees is unclear just yet, but it would presumably require setup and maintenance costs at the very least. And as we saw with McDonald’s Dynamic Yield acquisition, implementation, and eventual downgrade, not all new tech brings a justifiable amount of return on investment for franchisees. 

Labor also presents some urgent items to consider. 

While automating drive-thru ordering via a system like Apprente’s could aid in the current struggle against the current labor shortage, franchisees will still have to spend time and money training their employees to use the tech and work alongside it. In many cases, that means training them to learn when to not get involved.

At the investor conference, Kempczinski said one learning from the existing 10 implementations of the new tech was training crew to “not want to jump in” as soon as there is a question or pause from the system. “We’ve had to do a little bit of training of ‘just keep your hands off the steering wheel, let the computer do its work,’” he told investors, adding that it took time for crew members to learn to “trust” the technology. 

While McDonald’s hasn’t officially confirmed this, it’s likely franchisees would be in charge of training for the above. That in turn would mean operators and manages must first get comfortable with the tech themselves. And, given the high rate of turnover in QSRs, this could potentially eat up a lot of time if a manager were continually having to train new hires.

Many see the digitization of the drive-thru as essential. The drive-thru lane has become progressively slower over the years. The pandemic didn’t help that latter point, since lockdowns turned the drive-thru into one of the main order channels for restaurants, making overall wait times even longer. Other QSRs, including Chipotle, KFC, and Burger King, have all announced plans to make their drive-thrus more high tech to speed up wait times and improve order accuracy. Clearly McDonald’s needs to compete. This time around, though, it also needs to make sure it thoroughly considers its franchisees’ needs in the process.

More Headlines

Presto Launches a Bundle of Tech Tools to Help Restaurants Reopen With Fewer Staff – Restaurant tech platform Presto today launched a new product bundle it says is meant to help restaurants keep their operations up-to-par in the midst of the ongoing labor shortage.

Tesla May Soon Open Its Own Restaurant – Tesla has filed a trademark under restaurant services, which suggests the automaker may be finally working to realize its dream of combining its charging stations with an old-school drive-in restaurant.

Yum China’s New Program Will Teach Digital Skills to Children in Rural Areas – Yum! Brands spinoff Yum China is investing in more digital education for underserved areas. 

Datassential: 10% of U.S. Restaurants Have Closed Permanently

A total of 10.2 percent of all U.S. restaurants have permanently closed since the start of the pandemic, according to new research from food industry intelligence firm Datassential.

The report finds that of the 778,807 restaurants of all types in the U.S. that were open at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 79,438 have closed for good as of today. (The figure includes restaurants launched during the pandemic.)

Food trucks have suffered the most of any category, with 22.5 percent of them permanently shuttered. Chains with less than 501 units have also seen high rates of permanent closures, and the report finds that chains with between 51 and 100 units have see the highest closure rate (16.2 percent).

Unsurprisingly, larger QSR chains have come out of the last year with the fewest closures: 9.8 percent. Because these businesses were already set up to cater to off-premises orders like takeout and drive-thru, they were inherently better able to weather the figurative storm that shuttered dining rooms in 2020 and forced an industry-wide shift to off-premises formats. As well, large QSR brands like Chipotle or McDonald’s had the money to further invest in digital ordering tools and new(ish) formats like delivery. 

These companies are also the ones currently leading a quasi-reinvention of the fast food format. Burger King, Shake Shack, the aforementioned brands, and many others have in recent months released designs for new store formats that emphasize more drive-thru lanes, less dining room space, and more ways to automate the order and pickup process. (Conveyor belts!)

Meanwhile, the Small Business Administration will start taking applications next month for grants from the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund. Restaurants, bars, and other foodservice establishments that are not publicly traded and have fewer than 20 locations are eligible to apply.

Is a Major Starbucks-Eat Just Partnership in the Works?

Over the weekend, I wrote about Starbucks testing a 100 percent plant-based menu at a location in Seattle, a move company CEO Kevin Johnson said was a direct response to consumer demand. But it seems that’s not the only move the coffee giant has made recently when it comes to building a more plant-forward menu. From the looks of it, Starbucks could be pushing for a major partnership with plant-based egg-maker Eat Just, too.

As one does on the internet, I stumbled across a piece of Starbucks news from the end of January that at the time went largely unnoticed. The Dallas Observer reported that Starbucks has expanded the test market for a vegan breakfast sandwich the company quietly piloted in Washington state in October 2020. 

This is apparently not the same breakfast sandwich as the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich Starbucks launched in 2020, which features Impossible’s sausage patty but also uses regular ol’ eggs and cheese. The new iteration is 100 percent vegan and, according to the Observer, is made up of an Impossible patty, an Eat Just folded egg, and a plant-based cheese from an unnamed company. The sandwich is now testing in the Dallas and Forth Worth metro area and available for a limited time.

Further investigation pulled up this Starbucks menu item called “plant-based breakfast sandwich” that looks identical. Though Impossible is the only company named for now, the menu item includes “a plant-based egg patty” that looks suspiciously like Eat Just’s folded egg product.

Eat Just was not available to comment for this story. But nothing about a major Starbucks-Eat Just alliance would surprise. The latter’s folded egg product is an obvious candidate for the QSR realm, given that it requires little prep (heat it up and serve) and has no real competitor right now when it comes to frozen egg products made from plants. It also closely resembles the omelette-like patty found on traditional breakfast sandwiches everywhere, including Starbucks, Dunkin’, McDonald’s, and the independently owned coffeeshop down the street.

Starbucks is also well known at this point for the sous-vide egg bites it sells at most U.S. locations. As it happens, Eat Just recently released its own line of sous-vide bites which for the moment are only in grocery stores but could be customized to fit on a plant-based Starbucks menu.

Starbucks’ Johnson said on a recent earnings call that breakfast drove the high performance of food during the company’s first quarter. Given that plus the fact that a 100 percent vegan breakfast sandwich has been seen and tasted in the real world, it seems only a matter of time before we hear wind of a much more widespread partnership between the two companies.

Survey: More Than Half of Restaurant Sales Will be Digital by 2025

Digital sales will make up more than half, or 54 percent, of all quick-service and limited-service restaurant sales by 2025, according to new survey numbers from market research firm Incisiv. That’s 70 percent higher than pre-COVID estimates, the firm notes.

That projected growth isn’t hard to understand. It’s been an all-out dumpster-fire of a year for restaurants, with hundreds of thousands of restaurants permanently shuttered and billions of dollars already lost. Currently, restaurants across the country are reverting to off-premises-only models, which lend themselves more to minimal interactions between restaurant staff and customers.

But as we saw early on in the pandemic, even limited/quick service restaurants struggled to manage the sudden influx of takeout, curbside pickup, drive-thru, and delivery order channels. Bigger brands with money to burn and existing digital strategies have obviously fared better over the last eight months than those without many tech investments in place. As of July, Chipotle had increased its digital sales by over 200 percent thanks to the brand’s pre-COVID focus in that area. Another example is Starbucks, which as publicly said 80 percent of its orders before the pandemic were already for to-go channels.

Separately, Incisiv notes that while restaurant chains are making investments in tech, they are “not necessarily addressing the highest priorities nor the solutions that will deliver the best maximum ROI across diverse customer expectations.”

It’s a point we make all the time here at The Spoon. There are seemingly endless options for businesses when it comes to tech, but they’re not all equal in terms of the value they provide to a businesses trying to serve customers quickly, safely, and with the same quality they would get in the dining room. For example, the so-called “contactless” kits that address the in-dining room experience may become a staple of the future, but they can’t exactly add value when dining rooms are shut down. On the other hand, focusing tech investments on tools that will make digital ordering and fulfillment easier and cheaper should be a priority. To that end, Incisiv’s report urges restaurants to “make enhancements in digital tech.” Those that do, according to the report, “will be better positioned should another shutdown occur.” Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is happening as we speak.

As noted above some of the bigger QSR brands are clearly leading the charge when it comes to digital sales trends, but Incisiv says there is plenty of area for both growth and improvement. Customer satisfaction actually remains low in a few key areas. Only 40 percent of survey respondents were satisified with their pickup experience; that number drops to 25 percent for delivery. Half of guests prefer paying with a mobile wallet, but fewer than 20 percent of QSRs provide expanded payment options.

The survey found that “close to 70 percent” of restaurant chains have “stated their intent” to increase investments in mobile ordering. Over the long term, digital sales are expected to dip slightly once in-dining room service is resumed with some semblance of its former days. However, the return of the dining room won’t mean the end of off-premises, not if recent developments around condensed store formats and expanded drive-thru lanes are any indication. Incisiv also notes that share of delivery sales is expected to grow 23 percent by 2025 versus a pre-COVID forecast of 15 percent.

As the report notes, if all of this holds true, it will be QSR chains making the most progress in terms of digital ordering and setting the example for the rest of the industry. 

Dunkin Donuts

Cashierless Tech Could Move Dunkin’ Ahead in the Race to Reinvent the QSR Format

QSR chain Dunkin’ will launch its cashierless checkout pilot program in October at a store in California, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. And in doing so, it may set new standards for restaurant chains when it comes to how they deploy contactless tech.

News of Dunkin’s foray into the world of Amazon Go-style checkout first surfaced at the end of August, when Mastercard announced several partnerships to deploy its newly launched Shop Anywhere platform, which is powered by Accel Robotics. Shop Anywhere uses the computer vision and AI technology of Accel robotics provide checkout-free restaurant and retail experiences. 

At the California Dunkin’ location, that means customers will opt into the Shop Anywhere platform via the Dunkin’ mobile app, then receive a QR code to enter the store. From there, customers can grab their coffee and donuts and simply walk out of the store. Accel’s system uses computer vision to keep track of items and sends a digital receipt to the customer once they leave the store.

Companies are already testing this “grab-and-go” format in several grocery and convenience store formats, but Dunkin’ is one of the first to make such an announcement in the QSR realm. 

And cashierless tech may well set the chain apart at a time when more and more QSRs are making public their high-tech visions of future store formats. At the end of last week, Burger King unveiled its plans for a physically smaller space that emphasizes to-go formats and contactless ordering and payments. Taco Bell brought news of its “Go Mobile” format in August. Shake Shack and Chipotle have also made announcements of their own around new formats driven by more technology and fewer interactions between customers and restaurant staff.

All of those examples still rely on customers placing orders, manually paying, then waiting for their food. Being able to simply grab an item and leave the store without having to do any of those things would definitely provide a faster, more efficient, and truly contactless restaurant experience.

Dunkin’s menu, which is primarily coffee and donuts, rather than customized orders, lends itself to such a model. But there are plenty of QSRs out there at which the cashierless format would make sense, Starbucks being the prime example. Cashierless checkout could even make sense at other chains for certain items that can be pre-prepped — for example, if someone just wanted to grab some chips and queso from Chipotle. White Castle, too, plans to experiment with cashierless checkout, and is another Mastercard partner planning too deploy Shop Anywhere later this fall.

None of this is quite a reality yet, but Dunkin’ for the last couple years has proven itself an early adopter of restaurant tech. It was one of the first to offer drive-thru lanes dedicated to mobile orders, and has since opened several of its next-generation stores that feature self-service kiosks, geofence-enabled delivery, and other to-go-friendly tools and technologies. Seen in that light, cashierless checkout seems the next logical step, and one others will inevitably take as well in the near future. 

Taco Bell Unveils New ‘Go Mobile’ Restaurant Concept

Two big trends are a foot in the world of quick-service restaurants: orders going off-premises and major chains redesigning their store formats to better meet that demand. Taco Bell is the latest major QSR player to respond to these trends. Today, the chain announced a new restaurant concept, “Go Mobile,” that emphasizes the role of digital in the restaurant experience.

Speaking in today’s press release, Taco Bell President and Global COO Mike Grams called the new format “a completely synchronized digital experience centered around streamlining guest access points.” 

To that end, the new store format includes two drive-thru lanes, with one dedicated to customers that order via the Taco Bell mobile app. New technology integrated into the app will detect when customers arrive to pick up their order and direct them as to where they can retrieve the food. (Sidenote: the tech sounds like geofencing a la Panera, but Taco Bell’s press release did not use the term.) Go Mobile will also feature curbside pickup and “bellhops,” who will take orders via tablet in the drive-thru lane and at curbside. 

Taco Bell also notes that this new store format will be physically smaller than its normal brick-and-mortar locations, which makes sense, given the reduced dining room capacity under which restaurant operate these days. 

Other QSRs have made similar moves in the last few months. Starbucks is reformatting many of its traditional cafes to act as to-go-focused locations. Chipotle, a brand not historically known for drive-thru service, is all-in on its Chipotlanes. Shake Shack is also revamping its focus to include more drive-thrus and digital-forward experiences. Even Domino’s, which has always been an off-premises business, is revamping its format to include more curbside pickup.

Taco Bell’s first Go Mobile store is set to open in the first quarter of 2021.

Takeout, delivery, and curbside pickup are still the main formats through which these big brands can reach customers at the moment. With dining rooms still operating at reduced capacity and the future of full-service restaurants still very much uncertain, we will see more QSRs rethinking their brick-and-mortar locations to fit the off-premises style that’s become, for better or worse, the new restaurant experience. 

NPD: As QSR Transactions Improve, Full-Service Restaurants Continue to Struggle

Consumer transactions at restaurants have seen some improvement in the last couple weeks compared to the early days of the pandemic, though not much of it has gone beyond the quick-service restaurant.

NPD released new data today that notes consumer transactions at major U.S. restaurant chains declined 10 percent compared to one year ago for the week ending July 5. That’s a slight uptick from the previous week’s decline of 14 percent. 

However, NPD notes that “all of the improvement in the week sources to major quick service restaurant chains, where customer transaction declines improved by 4 points from the prior week’s decline of 13 percent versus year ago.”

That QSRs are seeing the bulk of the improvements shouldn’t surprise. The QSR format is inherently designed to better serve off-premises orders than full-service dine-in restaurants. Even before the pandemic and shelter-in-place mandates upset the entire industry, QSRs were accelerating their efforts to offer more pickup, delivery, and drive-thru capabilities. Starbucks, for example, has said 80 percent of its orders were already to-go before the pandemic. And a large portion of Chipotle’s business has for more than a year now been dedicated to building out off-premises-friendly store formats and developing a robust digital ordering strategy. 

Chipotle is a good illustration of how much more quickly and nimbly many QSRs were able to act in the wake of the pandemic compared full-service restaurants. Once social distancing measures went into effect, the chain simply accelerated its existing efforts around off-premises and digital ordering. The result was that Chipotle recorded its highest quarter ever for digital sales in Q1 2020. 

The last few months have been a much harder haul for full-service restaurants. NPD reported this week that full service restaurants saw customer transactions down -30 percent compared to one year ago, which is a five-point decline from the previous week. 

Author and NPD food industry advisor David Portalatin said that “full-service performance remains largely at the mercy of governmental regulation and the persistence of the coronavirus. For many full-serves, making the pivot to off-premise is far more difficult.”

As of right now, many would-be restaurant customers are still wary of actually sitting down in a dining room to eat a meal. The current spike on coronavirus cases across the U.S. also complicates matters, since some states have had to halt or roll back their reopening plans.

These challenges aren’t going to let up anytime soon, unfortunately. In all likelihood, nobody will be dining out en masse until a vaccine is found and widely administered. By then, consumer behaviors may have shifted to off-premises orders so heavily many people may not want to eat out, at least not on a regular basis. That will present a whole new bucket of challenges for restaurants and restaurant tech companies alike.

Report: Digital Orders and Delivery Driving Restaurant Sales, Full-Service Still Struggling

Digital restaurant orders and delivery orders were up for the month of March, according to new numbers from The NPD Group. Despite — or more likely because of — state-mandated dining room closures, NPD reported digital orders for restaurant meals increased by 63 percent and delivery orders by 67 percent.

Quick-service restaurants (QSRs) represented the majority of the increase in digital and delivery orders. That’s no big surprise, as many of these types of restaurants were already primed for off-premises ordering before the pandemic ever hit. In fact, as far back as November of 2019, the National Restaurant Association predicted that off-premises orders would drive the bulk of QSR restaurant sales over the next decade. Chains like McDonald’s and Chipotle were already running $1 billion-plus digital businesses, and Starbucks said recently that 80 percent of its U.S. orders were to-go orders before the pandemic.

The bigger hit was taken by full-service restaurants. According to NPD, full-service restaurants “realized traffic declines of 35 percent in the month of March compared to year ago March.” The firm also noted that “On-premise traffic share prior to the pandemic represented 80% of the FSR business and off-premise 20%.” 

Shelter-in-place orders obviously changed those numbers. Many full-service restaurants have tried to pivot to off-premises strategies. NPD notes that “FSRs able to offer carry-out and delivery were able to lift the segment’s off-premise traffic share by 31%.” But as we’ve covered before, switching from a model that’s built primarily around dine-in traffic to one that relies on things like delivery and curbside pickup can be a complicated process that restaurants aren’t operationally equipped to handle. Meanwhile, some restaurants, unable to weather the current storm, have closed permanently. Others have ceased operations citing health concerns for their staff. 

Even as states slowly begin to reopen, businesses won’t be pivoting back to their former dine-in models. Most restaurants will have to operate at reduced capacity — down to 25 percent in some cases — and consider implementing things like reservations systems and store redesigns to accommodate social distancing guidelines. 

That said, transactions at full-service restaurants have improved slightly, declining only 67 percent for the week ending on May 3 compared to 71 percent the previous week. This is the third consecutive week these declines have improved, according to NPD. Dine-in restrictions have lifted for roughly 192,000 restaurant units in the U.S., though many more challenges remain for the coming weeks. Those include adopting technologies to enable more digital orders, setting up contactless payments, and preparing for another possible wave of pandemic at some point in the future. 

NPD’s numbers echo what the firm’s Executive Director Susan Schwallie mentioned last week at The Spoon’s virtual fireside chat. “COVID has been an accelerator for everything online and digital,” she said at the online event. In addition to online ordering, ghost kitchens are another tech-driven initiative that will stick around in the restaurant world over the long term. 

McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Other Major QSRs Suspend Dine-In Service Across the U.S.

McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, and several other major restaurant chains have suspended dine-in service for the foreseeable future across all of their brands. The moves come as cities and states across the country are mandating restaurant closures to help slow the spread of coronavirus.

Starbucks was one of the first, announcing over the weekend it will “temporarily change” to a to-go-only model in all U.S. and Canada stores. The news was quickly followed by Atlanta-based chain Chick-fil-A saying it will completely shutter some locations while the bulk of its stores will shift to an off-premises-only model.

More have made similar moves in a very short time:

McDonald’s announced Monday that “company-owned restaurants will close seating areas, including the use of self-service beverage bars and kiosks,” and that the company will shift those stores to drive-thru, takeout, and delivery formats. The chain said it expects its franchise operators to do the same very soon.

Taco Bell has closed dining rooms at all company-owned locations. In a letter, company CEO Mark King said the chain is “equipping our restaurants to serve our guests via drive-thru and delivery only where necessary.”

Shake Shack has closed down dining rooms at all of its corporate-owned stores. Customers can still place orders at the restaurant as well as through the usual delivery channels.

Effective today, chicken-centric QSR Zaxby’s will limit service to drive-thru only. The brand is encouraging customers to use its online ordering feature to further increase social distancing and limit the amount of person-to-person contact needed when picking up food.

Today, Chipotle announced that all of its 2,600 restaurants will suspend dine-in service and will focus on takeout and delivery.

There are others: Dunkin’, Panda Express, Arby’s Sonic . . .

I could go on, but the reality is that more states will almost certainly mandate restaurant closures, and those moves will encompass all restaurants, from mom-and-pop stores to QSRs to massive chain brands like The Cheesecake Factory.

Most of these brands will offer some form of off-premises ordering to keep business going for the foreseeable future.

Taco Bell Outlines Plans to Make Consumer-facing Packaging Sustainable by 2025

Taco Bell announced this week its goal to make all consumer-facing packaging — cups, wrappers, etc. — recyclable, compostable, or reusable by 2025, according to a press release. 

This pledge applies to all materials that come into contact with consumers when they order food, from taco wrappers to cups to those $5 Cravings boxes. While the press release doesn’t delve too far into what materials might be used to make some of these items more sustainable, it does note that PFAS, Phthalates and BPA — chemicals associated with health problems like cancer and thyroid disease — will be removed from all consumer-facing packaging. 

The chain will also install recycling and composting bins in locations “where infrastructure permits,” meaning any city that supports those waste streams. 

In an interview with Fast Company, Missy Schaaphok, Taco Bell’s global nutrition and sustainability manager, offered some hints as to what future packaging might look like. That includes things like food baskets for dine-in customers and compostable or paper straws “in places that legally require them.”

Taco Bell already has some sustainability initiatives in place. It introduced recyclable cups and lids for cold drinks in in early 2019, and as Schaaphok told Fast Company, “a good portion of [the chain’s] packaging today is already recyclable or compostable.”

That’s all well and good, but a major challenge for QSRs nowadays is convincing customers to dispose of recyclable and compostable materials properly instead of just chucking them in the garbage. In some states, this will be easier. California, for example, passed AB 827 last year, a law that requires limited-service restaurants to make recycling and composting bins available, as well as provide signage to guide customers as to which items go in which bins.

Getting customers to actually recycle and compost their waste is not a Taco Bell-specific issue. As The Spoon contributor Stephen J. Bronner pointed out in a post this week, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, and others have all pledged sustainability initiatives. Many of them are around packaging. All of them will have to contend with how to best communicate the importance of sustainability to the consumer.

For QSRs, who have always relied heavily on disposable packaging for both in-house and to-go orders, making the “reduce, reuse, recycle” concept easy for customers will become paramount in terms of actually keeping trash out of the landfills. 

Drive-Thrus Are Getting Slower. Can Tech Change That?

Wait times in the drive-thru lines are getting slower, according to QSR’s annual Drive-Thru Study, which launched this week and says drive-thru speed of service in 2019 was 20 seconds longer than in 2018.

The study actually covers a number of different areas of drive-thru performance, from customer service to order accuracy to which chains are installing digital menu boards. But the continued lag in speed of service stuck out this year.

In 2019, the average time a customer spent in the drive-thru — from speaker to order window — was 255 seconds. To put that number in context, the average time from speaker to order window in 1999 was roughly 181 seconds, according to data from previous QSR Drive-Thru studies. That number dipped up and down over the next decade before climbing to 226.30 seconds in 2016. It’s gone steadily upward ever since.

What’s with the wait?

One reason is menus. The QSR 2019 study notes that “more complex menus” contributed to slowdown in order accuracy, which fell just over 5 percentage points compared to 2018. As the study says, “more intricate menus touted by brands like Taco Bell and Arby’s proved to be a stiffer challenge for employees working to deliver complicated orders at top drive-thru speed.”

Along with those larger menus come more complicated food items, like Taco Bell’s now-retired XXL Grilled Stuft Burrito, the making of which adds more time to the drive-thru process. Even a latte, which isn’t an inherently complicated drink, takes more seconds to make than pouring a regular cup of coffee. Some chains brands have gotten hip to this problem and trimmed down their bloated menus. Even so, it ain’t 1985, when you could count McDonald’s burger offerings on one hand, and we’re not likely to return to that level of simplicity.

Mobile orders also contributed to the slowdown in drive-thru times, and with “lanes possibly getting more crowded with not only drive-thru customers but also those picking up mobile orders, it’s going to be difficult for brands to shave off seconds moving forward.”

Some are trying to knock out those extra seconds, most notably Dunkin’, which started building stores with dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile-order customers in 2018. Fellow donut-peddler Krispy Kreme is doing the same as it revamps its locations for the digital age. In Australia, KFC is piloting a drive-thru-only store heavily focused on digital transactions and testing out new concepts to speed up wait times.

But mobile orders aren’t going away, and, as I mentioned earlier, menus aren’t about to get smaller, so what’s a restaurant chain to do?

Implement AI.

McDonald’s made that much clear when it acquired Dynamic Yield in March and subsequently rolled out the latter’s AI tech to hundreds of locations. Right now, that particular implementation of the tech is aimed at things like order accuracy and quickly upselling items to customers. Where it could make a massive impact, though, is in making restaurants more predictive.

Dynamic Yield-enabled menu displays at McDonald’s drive-thrus can show customers food based on data like the time of day, the weather, and trending menu items. Narrowing down someone’s food selection based on those factors could help the average customer parse through a massive menu and get through the selection process faster, shaving seconds off the time between ordering and collecting the meal. As McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook noted on an earnings call in April, “. . . using the data collected based on current restaurant traffic at the drive-thru, the technology will begin to suggest items that can make peak times easier on our restaurant operations and crew.”

It could also help predict future demand. If the system can tell by data that it’s 80 degrees outside, sunny, and a football game is about to let out nearby, the restaurant can prepare itself with extra staffing ahead of time to move a potentially bigger rush through the line faster.

Meanwhile, companies like 5Thru and Valyant AI are implementing things like license plate recognition and conversational AI to speed up the order and pay process in the drive thru. 5Thru, in particular, is also working with car manufacturers to add voice-order capability in the vehicle, sort of like Domino’s is doing with Chevrolet and other car companies.

All of these efforts are aimed at automating parts, or eventually all, of the drive-thru process to keep chains competitive in what’s become a very oversaturated fast food market. This time next year, we’ll have a better idea of how far towards that goal Dynamic Yield can get McDonald’s, and AI in general can get the industry. If the seconds spend in line start to drop, we could one day offer a 2020-sized menu much faster, so restaurant operators can party like it’s 1999.

AI Will Now Take Your Breakfast Order at the Drive-Thru

We’ve talked about AI coming to the drive-thru for some time now, and in Denver, CO, one company is finally making that happen. Valyant AI, a CO-based AI company, has set up shop at the Good Times Burger & Frozen Custard restaurant, and its AI platform is taking breakfast orders at the drive-thru.

Valyant AI’s “digital customer service representatives” aren’t all-purpose AI assistants — the company actually built the platform for the quick-service restaurant industry’s many drive-thrus. The patent-pending proprietary platform integrates directly into a restaurant’s drive-thru hardware as well as its POS system.

Better accuracy is something Valyant AI promotes heavily. According to a recent press release, the company, founded in 2017, built and taught the platform using real customer recordings from drive-thrus. And since the system was designed from the ground up for QSRs, it has a significantly smaller range of questions to contend with than a Google Assistant or Alexa. In theory, at least, that should make for more accuracy. The technology also uses the human-in-the-loop model, which is a type of AI that employs both machine and human intelligence to create learning models. So if the system can’t answer a question or fulfill a bizarre order, a human employee can intervene.

More and more, restaurant industry people are calling voice-order tech the next big thing, projecting an explosion of devices and platforms coming to market over the next year or so.

Valyant AI isn’t the first company to try serving up voice control for the drive-thru. Most notably, Clinc, who started out in the financial services sector, is expanding into the QSR realm. Since Clinc’s platform is built to treat everything it hears as data — rather than having to map back to a dictionary — it could potentially handle some of those complex drive-thru orders without the need for human intervention.

According to Valyant AI’s website, the company spent two years developing its technology. And while it’s still in beta, it seems to have launched just in time to seriously compete: 50 percent of revenue for QSR restaurants comes from the drive-thru, according to a recent study, and order accuracy is the number one concern for fast food restaurants in this area.

If Valyant AI’s Denver breakfast run is successful, we’ll probably be holding a lot more conversations with machines when it comes to the drive-thru, at breakfast and beyond.