Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional information about Chick-fil-A’s College Park, Maryland location.
Dive Brief:
- Chick-fil-A plans to open a second Little Blue Menu location, a delivery-only kitchen, in College Park, Maryland, this year, the company announced last week.
- The chain opened its first off-premise-only prototype in Nashville,Tennessee, in 2021 and has been testing and tweaking menu items to develop restaurant concepts Outfox Wings and Because, Burger.
- Chick-fil-A is using customer feedback as part of its menu creation process. Select guests receive a notification from the chain’s app after their order is complete to take a customer satisfaction survey, per a Chick-fil-A blog post.
Dive Insight:
While Chick-fil-A originally planned to open a second Little Blue Menu location in Atlanta last year, it ran into some construction challenges, the company wrote in an email to Restaurant Dive. It still hopes to open a location in Atlanta in the future.
Little Blue Menu originally tested two other concepts, Flock & Farm and Garden Day, in addition to Outfox Wings, but it is no longer testing those concepts, the company said.
The Nashville Little Blue Menu was developed out of Chick-fil-A’s first delivery-only kitchen, which opened in 2018 to provide delivery, catering and mobile order pickup. That location also offers self-delivery of Little Blue Menu items, and drivers use electric vehicles to deliver within a 10-minute radius, according to the company’s blog post. Customers can also pick up their Little Blue Menu orders. Chick-fil-A will also offer in-house delivery at the College Park location.
Even though Chick-fil-A is expanding its delivery-only and virtual concepts, other restaurants have been pulling back on such investments. Wendy’s dramatically reduced its partnership with Reef, which originally was for 700 kitchens. Chili’s closed its first off-premise-only restaurant two months after opening it to focus more on in-restaurant initiatives and traditional development.
