Problem: I recently went to a Starbucks drive-through to buy coffee for my family. Transparently, I’m not a big fast-food consumer and prefer to cook at home. So it was my first time in a drive-through in almost 10 years. The difference was striking: back when I used to eat fast food, drive-throughs were inefficient, slow, and extremely hard to use (you could barely hear the staff through the window). But this drive through had a 8 foot touch screen, amazing display, a menu that displayed my order as I ordered it, and clear audio.
Seeing all of this I realized: what would it look like to completely automate the drive-through either in part or in full?
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Solution: Surprisingly, Wendy’s and Google have been discussing and thinking about this problem directly. In May 2023, they entered into a partnership together for Google to provide Wendy’s with an LLM to understand customer ordering intent. AS described by The Verge,
Wendy’s is partnering with Google to create an AI chatbot that can take orders at its drive-thrus, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The fast-food chain has plans to bring its first “Wendy’s FreshAI” enabled drive-thru to a Columbus, Ohio, restaurant in June.
The chatbot will be able to take verbal orders from customers who line up at Wendy’s drive-thru kiosks, all with the hope that it will help reduce long wait times. Wendy’s worked with Google to build a tailored chatbot on top of the company’s existing large language model (LLM), which it’s bound to reveal updates about at its Google I/O event on Wednesday. This all goes along with Google’s push into AI, as its Cloud unit sells the idea of companies commissioning their own models for different purposes, built on their own data.
Part of Google’s work with Wendy’s means ensuring the AI is brushed up on some of Wendy’s lingo, such as knowing that a “milkshake” translates to a “Frosty” and that a “JBC” is short for a “junior bacon cheeseburger.” As soon as a chatbot takes a customer’s order, it will appear on a screen for line cooks. A worker will then hand the completed meals to customers at the pickup window, just like any other order.
Some commenters on the article even took it one step further, suggesting that the business could take a siri-like approach to allow anyone to order at anytime from anywhere just with their voice. If embedded into the car, it would create a seamless ordering experience for any fast food chain and experience.
Why not incorporate this into the mobile app, and have a version that would run on Car Play/Android Auto? Then you could complete the whole process of ordering without waiting in line. It would be hands-free - "Hey Siri/Okay Google, order from Wendy's" and the AI takes it from there, and when your GPS location shows you've arrived the order starts being made. I'm honestly surprised this isn't a thing yet.
Ultimately, owning the drive through is actually a very valuable asset for a business and could certainly create a billion-dollar company. As described in Tenant’s 2021 QSR drive-through report:
There is an estimated 200,000+ drive-thru operations across the U.S. in 2020.
Americans visit drive-thru lanes about 6 billion times each year according to some statistics.
60% to 70% of most fast food sales come from drive-thru sales.
Drive-thru sales represent 70% of fast food sales which generates billions of dollars for the industry each month.
Just from this, suppose that the business charged a $0.01 fee for every API call and captured 25% of the market. From this, the business would do $15m a year in ARR just in the US. If the company made their technology even more seamless (i.e. not requiring a set-up, but just requiring say a standing microphone to be placed next to the ordering window) it would likely be able to charge more and would have higher penetration.
Monetization: Sales of this platform either as an API service or as a subscription to fast-food chains.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)