Burger King's Restaurant of the Future Includes Touchless, Mobile Order and Curbside

Burger King is unveiling new restaurant designs that will deliver flexibility, innovative features and convenient options for how BK food can be ordered and delivered, to fulfill changing guests demands. Dedicated mobile order and curbside pick-up areas, drive-in and walk-up order areas, enhanced drive-thru experience, exterior dining spaces and sustainable design elements are featured throughout the new designs.

Burger King's redesign comes as consumer demand for drive-thru has spurred QSR and fast casual brands to revisit their store development plans, adding drive-thrus and contactless pickup options to their new designs.

Created by the Restaurant Brands International in-house design group, the plans were drafted with input from tech, operations and food innovation teams to dramatically improve the Burger King restaurant guest experience. The new designs will provide multiple ordering and delivery modes and highlight a physical footprint 60% smaller than a traditional Burger King restaurant building and site. The new restaurant blueprints emphasize:

• Drive-In. Guests will be able to park their cars in the drive-in area under solar powered canopies, place their orders through the BK App by scanning a QR code at their parking spot, and have food quickly delivered to their cars.
• Curbside Delivery. Advance orders placed through the mobile app will have dedicated parking spots for curbside delivery. Guests will be able to notify the restaurant team member upon arrival via the app as instructed on the parking signs.
• Pick Up Lockers. Mobile and delivery orders can also be picked up from coded food lockers facing the exterior of the restaurant. The food will come straight from the kitchen to the pick up lockers.
• On-Premise Dining. One design option replaces the traditional indoor dining room with a shaded patio featuring outdoor seating for guests who prefer to dine on-premise.
• Drive-Thru. A double or triple drive thru features digital menu boards and merchandising. The multi-lane ordering and pick-up expedites the process, while a living wall frames the guest’s view into the kitchen interior, featuring the iconic Burger King broiler. An external walk up window on the glass facade will also be an alternative ordering point for take-out.
• Suspended Kitchen and Dining Room. One innovative design option features a floating or suspended kitchen and dining room above the drive-thru lanes configured to reduce the building footprint, making it ideal for urban driving cities. Drive-thru guests have their order delivered from the suspended kitchen by a conveyor belt system, and each lane has it’s own pick-up spot. This restaurant design option features a triple drive-thru with a dedicated lane for delivery drivers. Guests who want to dine in can enjoy the dining room and covered outdoor seating situated above the drive thru entrance. The design of this restaurant allows a 100% touchless experience.

“In March our in-house design and tech team accelerated new restaurant design plans and pushed the limits of what a Burger King restaurant could be,” said Josh Kobza, Restaurant Brands International Chief Operating Officer. “We took into consideration how consumer behaviors are changing and our guests will want to interact with our restaurants. The result is a new design concept that is attractive to guests and will allow our franchisees to maximize their return.”

Integrating Functionality and Technology

“The designs we’ve created completely integrate restaurant functionality and technology. The restaurant of the tomorrow merges the best functional technology with unique modern design to elevate our Burger King guest experience,” said Rapha Abreu, Global Head of Design at Restaurant Brands International. “We designed the interior and exterior spaces like we had a blank sheet of paper, designing without preconceived notions of how a Burger King restaurant should look.”

The first new designed restaurants will be built in 2021 in Miami, Latin America and Caribbean. To preview restaurant design renderings visit https://youtu.be/vwpz-wBqo4k and https://youtu.be/qoHONJCu4T0.