Dive Brief:

• Taco Bell had the fastest total average time at the drive-thru among major QSR brands at 278 seconds, Intouch Insight found in its yearly drive-thru survey.
• Chick-fil-A, which has an average total time of 436 seconds, was the fastest when taking into account the number of cars in a drive-thru, which dropped the chicken chain’s speed to 127.89 seconds, faster than Taco Bell’s adjusted average of 290 seconds.
• QSR brands generally improved speed of service from 2022 to 2023, with average time falling from 373 seconds to 343 seconds, driven mostly by a reduction of the number of cars in the drive-thru.

Dive Insight:

Companies still have room to improve on average service times, which reached 262 seconds this year, four seconds faster than 2022, but still about seven seconds slower than 2019. Future improvements could come from increased use of new drive-thru units. Intouch found brand prototypes, specifically McDonald’s Texas test unit and Taco Bell’s Defy unit in Minnesota, had much faster service times than system averages, with McDonald’s about 62 seconds faster and Taco Bell about 54 seconds faster.

This finding could bolster the development of more off-premise-focused stores, like Taco Bell’s digital-focused Go Mobile design, Chick-fil-A’s elevated drive-thru, or Del Taco’s 1,200-square-foot off-premise-only design. Incremental improvements in speed of service can yield measurable sales boosts, according to Intouch. Assuming a drive-thru remains busy, a five-second speed up in total time could yield over $8,000 in sales per unit per year.

Average QSR order accuracy increased only slightly, from 85% to 86%, and was confined to a relatively narrow range with the top performers, which were 92% accurate at best and 82% at worst, according to the study. Chick-fil-A and Wendy’s both notched significant improvement in order accuracy, with the chicken brand rising from 83% last year to 92% this year, and Wendy’s from 79% — the worst in the segment in 2022 — to 87% this year.

In contrast to speed of service, McDonald’s off-premise-only test unit in Texas lagged the system as a whole in order accuracy, at 80% vs 88%. Taco Bell’s Defy store was slightly more accurate (88%) than the overall brand (85%). 

Insight used mystery shoppers to collect the data, carrying out 1,491 visits at 10 different brands, spread across multiple dayparts to provide a general sense for the brands’ abilities to operate under different circumstances.