Tag: fast food restaurants

OM in the News: How Chick-fil-A Uses OM to Make Fast Food Faster

Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A is on the vanguard of fast-food drive-through operations management, regularly dispatching specialist teams to its more than 3,000 restaurants to study the minutiae of parking-lot traffic patterns and how employees hand off orders. Chick-fil-A recently notched $21.6 billion in U.S. sales, the highest per-restaurant total in the industry (even though the chain stays closed on Sundays). About 60% of its sales happen at drive-up windows.

Burgeoning demand has threatened the “fast” in Chick-fil-A’s fast-food model, writes The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 2, 2025). The “cockpit”—the hectic corner of the kitchen where orders are bagged and handed off to drivers—was growing crowded. Drive-through lanes would run out of room for cars, which sometimes spilled beyond the parking lots. Customer studies regularly gave the chain top marks for quality, accuracy and service, but its drive-throughs ranked highest in time elapsed from entry to exit.

At the new store near Atlanta, Chick-fil-A has 4 drive-through lanes and an elevated kitchen.

For years, Chick-fil-A’s popularity has resulted in long lines of cars. For example, one Chick-fil-A in Rockford, Illinois was straining under a crush of customers lured by a chicken sandwich deal one recent Friday afternoon. Cars inched along 2 drive-through lanes while workers tapped in orders and others handed off bags of sandwiches and fries. Later, the store operator and OM process analysts from the chain’s headquarters hunched over a laptop studying the earlier mayhem. Security cameras in the kitchen and a drone hovering over the parking lot had captured footage of the rush, which set a new sales record for the store. At its peak, the drive-through served one car every 13 seconds, an enviable achievement for any fast-food operation. But not good enough for the company.

OM  insights are reshaping Chick-fil-A’s restaurants. One recently opened near Atlanta with no dining room but 4 drive-throughs that can serve some 700 cars an hour. A second-floor kitchen prepares food that is delivered to the cars below via a system akin to a dumbwaiter.

Restaurant operators have also explored different ways to take drive-through orders. Instead of relying on speaker boxes, they stationed workers outside to take orders directly from idling cars, then call them into the kitchen through cellphones or headsets. That practice helped speed up service, and that customers appreciated more direct interaction.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What process analysis tools in Chapter 7 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text could be used to improve quality and service times?
  2. Why are some fast-food restaurants moving toward no indoor dining areas?

OM in the News: Fried Chicken Chain Cut Worker Steps by 9,000 a Day

Pollo Campero workers at an Orlando restaurant which features the company’s new kitchen design.

Pollo Campero plans to more than double its U.S. store count. But first, it’s halving the number of miles workers walk each day. The chicken chain mapped how workers were moving around stores and revamped its restaurant design to allow people to work more efficiently, reports Bloomberg.com (April 4, 2024). It slashed the number of steps taken by the staff member who ensures orders are delivered promptly and accurately from 18,000 per shift – or 3.4 miles – to 9,500.

“Every step you save adds to the bottom line and saves labor costs,” said the firm’s VP. The reduction can also result in faster service and happier customers. Pollo Campero’s initiative mirrors an industry-wide push for higher productivity as restaurants face elevated costs. While many restaurants now say that staffing and turnover are back to pre-pandemic levels, the median base wage for their workers is 18% higher than three years ago.

These elevated costs have added increased urgency to chains’ quest for efficiency, boosting interest in techniques (such as counting workers’ footsteps), that have been used for years. Higher productivity can help cut costs, the thinking goes, and allow restaurants to serve more customers per hour. Improving the metric — known as throughput in Supp. 7 of our text— can lead to higher sales. Companies looking to boost capacity include Popeyes, which is revamping its kitchens, and Starbucks, which is rolling out machines that brew coffee in 30 seconds.

At a Pollo Campero store in Orlando, the kitchen has a double-sided center island stocked with chicken and sides. Workers assembling orders for the drive-thru stand on the left and those putting together dine-in orders on the right, a setup that prevents them from bumping into each other. Boxes, condiments and napkins are all within reach.

The Orlando location is 2,600 square feet, 9% smaller than the average store blueprint. It also has 20% fewer seats than usual, owing to a shift toward on-the-go eating that has surged. The more compact store requires 10% fewer workers per shift.

Outside, the drive-thru features a digital board that customers can consult before pulling up to the speaker to place the order, helping avoid the “can I get uhhh”  when they don’t have enough time to study menus.  The goal is to clear dine-in customers in 5 minutes and drive-thru diners in 3.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. In what other ways could fast food chains increase throughput?
  2. What other chains are moving to smaller stores? Why?

OM in the News: The Fast Food Revolution

McDonald’s has a new Texas restaurant with no tables or seats or bathrooms for customers and a conveyor belt that routes food to drivers who order ahead. Chipotle also offers no place for customers to sit inside an Ohio restaurant that only takes digital orders. Taco Bell is evaluating a new design that features 4 drive-through lanes, double the typical two. Starbucks,  which long described itself as a “third place” for customers to gather after home and work, plans to add 400 U.S. stores with only delivery or pickup service in the next 3 years.

Taco Bell is testing a 4-lane drive through in Minnesota

America’s biggest restaurant companies made a bet during the pandemic that you would rather eat the food cooked on their premises someplace else. Now they are gambling you will want to do so for years to come. The strategy from these giant chains is to orient their operations around drive-throughs and online ordering while testing new restaurant concepts that only serve food to go, reports The Wall Street Journal (Jan.28-29, 2023). They say these designs will make them more profitable and efficient since restaurants that bring fewer customers inside cost less to build, maintain and staff.

Of all orders placed at U.S. fast-food restaurants in 2022, 85% were taken to go. That is down from a high of 90% during 2020 but up from 76% prepandemic. Among full-service restaurants, 33% of orders were to go in 2022— double prepandemic rates.

The concept of taking food and beverages to go took root in the years after World War II, as Americans embraced an automobile culture. In the 1970s the industry fully bought into the to-go idea. Wendy’s introduced its “pick-up” window in 1970, with the first McDonald’s drive-through in 1975. (90% of McDonald’s business is now drive-through).

The most distinctive feature of the new McDonald’s in Texas is an automated delivery system for customers who order ahead on an app. When you pull up to the window in the “order ahead” lane, a conveyor delivers your food with help from a robotic arm that pushes the bag out to the waiting car. Starbucks’ CEO has acknowledged its cafes now are often clogged with pick-up, drive-through, delivery and cafe orders all at once. The result: long lines and frustrated customers.  His plan is 700 more U.S. stores in the next 3 years with drive-throughs as the primary means of sales.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What operations issues will management face with this revised concept?
  2. What dangers are there in making such changes? Consider a SWOT analysis as in Chapter 2.

Guest Post: Fast Food Restaurants

Prof. Howard Weiss shares his insights with our readers monthly. We all spend time in fast food restaurants, so today’s topic should be of broad interest.

There are nearly 200,000 fast food restaurants, also known as quick serve restaurants (QSR), in the U.S. Obviously a key to these restaurants is short waits and fast service. Module D of your Heizer/Render/Munson textbook lists important measures for waiting line situations including:

 Average time that each customer spends in the queue
 Average queue length
 Average time that each customer spends in the system (waiting time plus service time)
 Average number of customers in the system

These measures have been increasing at many QSRs. However, the increase is not due to reduced productivity but rather to changes that have occurred in QSRs over the past several years. One change is that menus at fast food restaurants have expanded to include meals that take more time to prepare. The first fast food restaurant was White Castle, which opened in 1921 and had a very limited menu with only four items – a slider hamburger (which cost 5 cents), Coca Cola, coffee and apple pie. Today, QSRs have much more varied menus. Another reason that service times take longer is that patrons are becoming more sophisticated in placing custom orders, which take more time to prepare.

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of patrons who use the drive-thru lane. Much of this increase is due to COVID. All fast food restaurants reported an increase in 2021 of drive thru traffic with the percentage of patrons using drive-thrus being reported as 37% in one report and 52% in another. Because more customers are using drive-thrus the number of customers in line increases and therefore so does the waiting time.

There are steps fast food restaurants have taken to reduce the customer time in the system. Many have installed kiosks inside the restaurant so that ordering and payment is self-service. Just as ATMs increase the service capacity in a bank these kiosks increase the capacity at fast food restaurants. Another step is encouraging mobile ordering and payment so that the order will be ready when the customer arrives to pick it up. Some updated restaurant designs have increased the number of drive thru lanes.

Classroom discussion questions:
1. How have apps and kiosks changed how you receive service at QSRs?
2. What could be the downsides of QSRs using apps or kiosks?