Fast Food, Faster
The age of the Food Network has brought some pretty ironic results
You’d think that spending hours watching culinary masters would make us more appreciative of the time and skill needed to create quality cuisine. For yours truly, though, it’s had the opposite effect. Sure, I may delight in over-pronouncing the word panchetta (PAN-CHEE-ET-AHHH). But, if anything, I’m a more impatient diner than I was before…
People like me have created some interesting challenges for the restaurant industry — especially when it comes to fast food. How do you meet growing expectations for quality and freshness while maintaining a quick and relatively cheap product?
In the earliest days of the fast food business, simplicity was the name of the game. By keeping their menu items to a bare minimum, restaurants could deliver decent food for an unbeatable price and at an unprecedented pace. Sure you couldn’t get a salad through a drive-thru, but is anyone ever happy with that decision anyways?
While certain establishments such as In N’ Out have maintained the minimalist tradition, most of the biggest players in the industry are now on a quest to be all things to all diners. As misguided as this goal may be — the good news is that the customer has benefited.
Because they need you to wait a bit longer while they make your iced mocha, many fast food joints are actually becoming decent places to have a meal. During my childhood, your average McDonald’s looked like a cross between a carnival and the surgery wing of a hospital. Now they have mood-lighting and big-screen TVs!
Additionally, a new generation of players in the industry have upped the ante in terms of the quality and boldness of fast food — giving rise to the term “fast casual.” Chipotle, in particular, has broken ground by insisting on using authentic and sustainable sources of food — appealing to both the taste and sensibility of the modern customer.
But, even with all this change, I think something has to give with this industry — and that’s where design and technology enter the picture. As good as a Chipotle burrito can be (during the meal, not the next day), the experience of ordering one is an absolute pain. Sure those restaurants look pretty trendy (what with all that corrugated metal), but that doesn’t mean much when you’re shuffling shoulder to shoulder with other customers just so you can provide step-by-step instructions to the person making your meal.
To provide an example of what I’m talking about, I’ll point to the online shopping experience. Retailers like Amazon go to obsessive (and often creepy) ends to create an experience that’s genuinely 1:1 with their customers. They want to understand and anticipate what you uniquely want, making the purchase experience more about confirmation and less about deliberation. If Zappos were a restaurant, they wouldn’t have to ask you the old cliche “Do you want fries with that?” because they’d remember from your previous visit.
As a fan of fast food, this it what I’d like to see in the near future — an attempt to build more continuous relationships with customers. Imagine sitting down at a table in a restaurant that has no cash registers. Instead — you take your seat, receive a text asking you to confirm your previous order or place a new one, respond with your preference, then simply wait for an employee (that person that used to be taking orders) to bring out your food. The technology is out there to make this happen, and many restaurants are creating experiences that are pretty darn close.
Why is this important? Because the less time and energy you spend selling food, the more you can devote to the food you sell.
