MIAMI—Burger King has reimagined the restaurant dining experience, unveiling a new design with contactless ordering and delivery methods, all in a footprint 60% smaller than a traditional fast-food site, Ad Week reports. The new designs will first appear in Miami, Latin America and the Caribbean in 2021.
The new design enhances the guest experience in a post-COVID-19 world with sustainable and socially distant features, such as touchless technology, drive-in and walkup ordering areas, exterior dining options and a revamped drive-thru experience. One YouTube commentator likened the new look as a cross between a fast-food drive-in, a school and a gas station.
“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, COO of Restaurant Brands International (RBI), which owns Burger King. The plans included safeguarding the customer experience by giving more than one option for ordering and delivering.
The drive-in section allows guests to park under solar-powered canopies, order via the BK app and have food delivered to their car. Curbside delivery will be similar. Those picking up mobile orders can access their food from coded lockers facing the restaurant’s exterior. The drive-thru will have more than one lane with digital menu boards and merchandising, as well as delivery via a conveyer belt connected to the suspended kitchen.
The BK children’s playgrounds will no longer have a place in this new design. Instead, shaded and suspended patios with outdoor seating or a suspended dining room over the drive-thru lanes with covered outdoor seating will be the new norm.
“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 RBI. “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.”
Extracted in full from: https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/Sept/4/5-Burger-King-Rethinks-In-Store-Dining_Foodservice
