The Jodeco Road exit in McDonough, Ga., looks like any other growing thoroughfare off a major interstate, peppered with gas stations, a Starbucks, a Costco, a high school, new homes, and more. It now also features a massive and unique Chick-fil-A restaurant visible from blocks away, complete with extensive wayfinding features at the entrance that could rival a small theme park, and four clearly marked lanes flowing under and beside a raised kitchen.
This is Chick-fil-A’s first elevated drive-thru restaurant, located about a half hour south of metro Atlanta off Interstate 75, and it will open Thursday. The prototype features four drive-thru lanes – two designated for traditional drive-thru customers and two for mobile-order-ahead customers, including delivery drivers. It also features an elevated kitchen that transports food to team members below via a “meal transport system.”
The restaurant was intentionally designed to meet high demand; the kitchen is twice as big as a standard Chick-fil-A kitchen and the food transport system allows a meal to be delivered to a team member every six seconds. As such, the restaurant – one of two test prototypes for the company – is expected to deliver at least twice the amount of volume as a traditional restaurant, according to executive director of design Jonathan Reed.
“We believe it can do 2.5-to-3x the volume of a normal Chick-fil-A. That’s the expectation,” he said during an interview at the restaurant this week. “This is a great area; the demand is here. We built this restaurant with a lot of horsepower. Match that design with a local owner/operator, we think magic’s going to happen.”
For those keeping score at home, 2.5-to-3 times the volume of a normal Chick-fil-A is a lot of volume. The company’s average unit volumes last year reached a record $9.3 million – an 8.1% increase over the previous record, $8.67 million, reached in 2022.
Beyond volumes
In addition to producing higher volumes, the restaurant was also designed to create a better employee and customer experiences. The elevated kitchen and fulfilment areas below them are window-heavy, for instance, so there is no shortage of natural light in these workspaces. There is also a sizable lounge area for workers.
“We want to keep [employees] excited, engaged. We know team member engagement is a predictor of customer satisfaction. You can do the math. You can see it,” Reed said. “So, we’re intentional with our design and had team member input with the design.”
It's the customer experience, however, that remains the North Star for the company. Reed said the drive-thru channel coupled with digital channels make up a majority of Chick-fil-A’s sales. Mobile-thru (mobile order ahead) is also growing, with about 400 restaurants now online and about 600 expected to have the feature by the end of this year.
“We are relentlessly chasing our customer experience. We want customers to feel like they’ve had the best experience, exceed meeting their needs, and this is just what we do on a daily basis. We look at what their needs are, especially in this sales channel and this purchase occasion of speed and convenience, but never losing sight of the hospitality that is core to Chick-fil-A,” he said. “When they show up, we want them to feel that same hospitality whether they ordered from the app or face-to-face.”
Despite the drive-thru-only model, every meal is delivered to customers by a team member versus handed to guests out of a window, for instance. The parking lot is designed for employees only, with the exception of customers who may need to use the restroom located in the corner of the lot. The location is situated just off a major interstate, after all. There are also dedicated pull-aside lanes if a customer needs to follow up with an employee about their order.
Inside the giant kitchen is that “transport system,” in which kitchen employees place the order on a tray and send it down to the frontline employees on the first floor via a conveyor. The equipment “came off the shelf,” but with tweaks made to fit the operating model of Chick-fil-A, Reed said.
There is no hard timeline on how long Chick-fil-A will test this prototype before making follow up decisions, including additional such prototypes. Reed said the company will look at traditional key performance indicators such as speed of service, overall satisfaction, accuracy, taste, etc. There will also be team member surveys.
“We are a business of seconds and inches,” Reed said. “We believe if we can meet customer demand, if we get the right feedback from team members, the equipment is doing the things it’s supposed to do, the food transport system is doing the thing it’s supposed to do – if all those things line up, the financial metrics at the end, this will be a good return.”
In the meantime, Reed is looking forward to gaining some new learnings from the prototype; for example, could some of these features translate elsewhere in the system? Could this restaurant open more opportunities for collaboration between functions like operations and marketing? Will this meet or exceed customers’ changing demands?
“People’s time is a commodity. The fact that they show up with their money, give us their time, give us their hard-earned resources, we never want to take that for granted,” Reed said.
Local owner/operator
The elevated drive-thru concept is locally owned and operated by Brett Lewis, who has served as an owner-operator in the system since 2019 in Dalton, Ga. With this new restaurant, however, he returns to his hometown – the restaurant is 4 miles from where he grew up. Lewis expects to employ approximately 150 full- and part-time employees at the new location.
Lewis’ entire career has been with Chick-fil-A. He started working at a local restaurant after high school while also serving part-time at headquarters, and he is a graduate of the Chick-fil-A Leadership Development Program. Notably, Lewis’ mom, Melanie Farmer, worked at Chick-fil-A headquarters for more than 30 years.
“Local ownership, remarkable experiences, meaningful brand,” Reed said. “When those three things intersect, we win in the marketplace.”
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]
