Top 11 Drive-Thru Innovations

By CJ Tiernan

Back before we had our food hand delivered to our doorstep, we left our little homes and went and picked it up ourselves. But we didn’t completely encumber ourselves with the Sisyphean task of acquiring ready-to-eat snacks. Nope. We used the drive-thru (see also: drive-through). One simply placed their order from the comfort of their vehicle and moseyed around back to pick it up from a window carved in the side of a building. Pure, magisterial splendor. Since the advent of the drive-thru (itself a modification of the drive-up), there have been a large swath of improvements placed on various levels of the process. Below is my list of my Top 11 Innovations in the Drive-Thru sphere that I’m aware of. Enjoy!

Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

1. Order Confirmation Board

You ever order something from a drive-thru restaurant, not check your food until you get home, and then find out that your order is wrong? That they completely beefed it. Man, what a disappointing moment. It used to happen to me a lot as a kid when I’d order a burger at McDonald’s. My request was “ketchup only” and it was frequently botched. Now, courtesy of the confirmation board, if they don’t see I’m out here ordering only ketchup on my burger, I can identify and correct it before it’s too late. Accuracy, that’s the spice of life.

2. Digital Menu Board

What an arduous task being the sign guy must have been back in the day. All those little tiny letters you had to slide all the way across, one at a time, sometimes in reverse order. Oof. Now, the menu board can change from inside the safety of the building. Are you switching from breakfast to lunch? No need to spin the signs around. Just push the button. Are the ice cream machines down (why are they always down?)? You can do little cross out lines across the ice cream options and break people’s hearts visually instead of orally. Making it digital also allowed for a confirmation screen. There will be a lot of overlap between things on my list.

3. Multiple Lanes

There are certain times of day where the action at a fast-food restaurant is absolutely poppin’. To maximize efficiency, some places have adopted the split-lane or multiple lane system. You can target the bottlenecks and reduce wait time by adding more lanes. Chick-fil-A seems to have baked this process into their architecture more than most, but it’s become increasingly common. Sometimes, one lane is normal and the other is for pickup or online orders, streamlining and incentivizing the use of the app. Just like the grocery store, you’ll always pick the wrong lane, but rest assured that the fact there are multiple means you’ll be there faster than you otherwise would have.

4. POS Terminals

Long story short: there are buttons for each menu item, so rather than having to type an order in or hand-tabulate the total, you simply hit the buttons corresponding with the order as you receive it and the system, which will communicate the order to the kitchen and the other windows, does all the heavy lifting. Yikes! That wasn’t nearly as short as I intended. That is a run-on sentence for the ages. POS, for those not in the know, stands for Point-of-Sale. I apologize the for the education session at the conclusion of this message.

5. Headset / Hands-free / Remote Order Takers

 

One does not simply walk up to a drive-thru window and place an order. You verbally deliver your order to the unseen proverbial man behind the curtain and then wait to find out if they got it right (or are even there at all). It is an odd, impersonal system, but it allows for the kitchen to begin your order before you ever even pay. The employee can listen to your order and push the buttons without having to fret over switching back and forth between two things. In the immortal words of Sade: Smooth Operator. Also, certain locations will dispatch humans armed with electronics to take your order in person in front of the normal order spot when the line gets too long, furthering line-busting and expediting the process.

6. Multiple Windows

Picture this: back in the day, they only carved one window in the side of the building. You paid and received your order at the same window. I mean, what!? Can you imagine? Science, technology, and time partnered up to create a second (and sometimes third) window in the wall to enable the bottleneck to get the bottle-heck out of here (I mean, sometimes, I just write stuff down. They’re not all gonna be winners).

7. Vacuum Tubes/Contactless Delivery

Going to the bank these days is a task as unfamiliar as washing one’s bloomers in the washboard basin. But when I was a kid in the ‘90s, oh man did I enjoy me some vacuum tubes. When I worked in retail, I repeatedly advocated for a vacuum tube delivery system from the backroom to various salesfloor hot spots. It… did not take. Plus, thanks to the pandemic, the contactless delivery became essential (like the workers themselves). We didn’t fully grasp the airborne-specific nature of COVID and would wipe down our groceries when we got home. Contactless delivery was designed to remove the person-to-person nature of that risk. What a wild time that was.

8. App Ordering / Online Order-Ahead

If you’ve been to McDonald’s recently, you know about this one. They start every interaction with “will you be using your mobile app today?” And, yeah, I have the app but, fast-food restaurants are the candy at a checkout lane. They’re impulse buys. I’m not scheduling my day around a trip to Arby’s. I black out and then notice there’s a curly fry lying on the floor beside the brake pedal. How did it get there? I don’t know but I’ll find out next month when I pay my credit card bill. And while we’re on the subject: stop paying with cash at a drive-thru. This is supposed to be a fast process and you’re slowing it down. If you’re gonna live life in the fast-food lane, you gotta pay with card.

9. Kitchen Display System

You remember in movies and stuff when diners had those paper tickets they just stab with a giant metal rod facing straight toward the heavens? Who invented this contraption seemingly generated purely for a Final Destination movie? Well, those, my friends, have gone the way of the 90-minute movie. We now have digital displays in the kitchens that educate which items go to which orders and the order in which they need to be fulfilled, complete with modifications and real-time updates. We already hide the people working in the kitchen way in the back, now we don’t even see them, we just have a message board with a never-ending list of demands.

10. Pre-Order Signage

When you get to the menu board to place your order, the built-in speaker (and the human operating it) need your order now to keep the line moving. It is not the time to make decisions; the decision needs to have already been made. Enter the pre-order signage. It is a menu board (or at least a sampling of it) that allows you to see what is available for order before the spotlight turns its bright glow on you. While it will sometimes just be educating you on limited-time offers and newly available items, it is always a welcome opportunity to, as Jeremy Irons says: be prepared.

11. Third Window for Pickup

If you are someone who likes to customize your order, order for a large group of people, or use those little life-hacks for fresh fries like ordering them without salt, then you may have experienced “The Third Window.” It is a way of delivering your food to you without having to leave the building, but still getting you out of the way of the people who better toe the line behind you. To be honest, I think the third window and the vacuum tubes could team up for a real great opportunity here, but we haven’t gotten there yet. Someday…

Final Thoughts

Drive-thrus are wonderful ways to receive warm food fast (or, I guess you could order a salad or something too). They allow for an audible that doesn’t require planning, or a place to get lunch when you’ve only got a 30-minute break. They are a prodigious service to society and have evolved greatly over the years. These were the biggest and best innovations I could think of. Please let me know if I missed any of your favorites. And who knows, the world is always evolving. The best innovation yet could still be around the corner. Thanks! Have a great day!