For many Aussies, a road trip is often synonymous with a stop at a drive-thru – whether it’s for an early morning coffee, a lunchtime snack, or dinner after a long day out and about.
While the premise of a quick-service restaurant is simple enough to understand, expanding it is a significant undertaking that requires the expertise of someone qualified with a degree like a Graduate Certificate in Strategic Project Management.
As seen in recent months, the road to success can be hard for such restaurants. For a stalwart of the industry, however, an expansion into drive-thru restaurants is underway – with burger chain Grill’d recently opening drive-thru restaurants in Queensland and Victoria. In this highly competitive sector, does Grill’d have what it takes to take on industry giants like McDonalds and KFC?
The Story of Grill’d
Grill’d may be one of Australia’s largest burger brands, but you may be surprised to find that it’s only a relative newcomer to the quick-service business. Founded in 2004 by Simon Crowe, Simon McNamara, and Geoff Bainbridge, Grill’d offers a simple premise to customers – an in-restaurant dining experience that provides healthy burgers, free from nasties such as preservatives, antibiotics, or added hormones.
In its two decades of operation, it has expanded to operate more than 150 restaurants across Australia, with an additional international location in Bali. Additionally, customers can collect tokens from their purchases, which they can donate to local causes and initiatives known as Local Matters. Since 2011, this program has helped to provide more than $7 million in funding to more than thirty thousand local organizations.
As a result, Grill’d offers a very different customer experience than many burger chains. It provides high-quality meals for customers and impacts the local community by creating jobs and giving back to valuable organizations that need support.
Reimagining the Drive-Thru
Drive-thru lanes are an icon often synonymous with quick-service restaurants, with companies such as McDonald’s, KFC, and Hungry Jacks embedding them in many of their restaurant experiences.
There are very few premium burger restaurants that offer a drive-thru for customers, however – and Grill’d is aiming to satisfy customer demand by opening drive-thru lanes for customers in new restaurants. The first two Grill’d to offer drive-thru lanes were located in Mt Ommaney, located in Brisbane’s south-western suburbs, and Chadstone, located in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs.
For Grill’d, launching in the drive-thru space gives them a chance to inform future growth. In particular, founder Simon Crowe wants to maintain the full Grill’d menu and experience for drive-thru customers so that no matter how they choose to buy their burgers, they can have the same high-quality experience.
Transitioning to a model that supports drive-thru can be challenging for an organization with a well-embedded restaurant experience. There are many complexities when managing drive-thru operations, whether that’s training staff on the best way to communicate with customers or simply dealing with the demands of customers shifting away from traditional fast-food outlets.
Successes in Drive-Thru
A competitor that has seen success in the drive-thru space is the Mexican restaurant chain Guzman y Gomez. Launching its first drive-thru in Nerang, Queensland, in 2015, the company has seen great success in developing GYG restaurants with an embedded focus on drive-thru – with a separate production line for customers that choose to order through apps and drive-thru, when compared to in-store orders.
Drive-thru has been a profitable venture for GYG, with rapid growth helping to drive further growth within the brand. Their success emphasizes how the premium experience doesn’t have to be refined to an in-restaurant experience and helps to lay the blueprint for how other premium brands, such as Grill’d, can succeed in the drive-thru space.
It appears that Grill’d is starting to take note of the lessons that GYG has learned. Rather than retrofitting drive-thrus to existing restaurants, Grill’d is taking a similar approach to GYG – developing new sites that embed the drive-thru experience alongside new restaurants. In fact, it projects that as many as half of the next fifty restaurant openings will have a drive-thru, emphasizing just how important it is to future business success.
A Competitive Field
Quick-service restaurants are, by design, a hugely competitive field. Grill’d, at the time of writing, is one of Australia’s largest restaurant franchises – and is only set to grow as it continues to drive forward it’s ambitious growth plans.
However, the restaurant sector can be a challenging market to succeed in. The recent closure of more than half of Carl’s Jr. restaurants shows that brands can also face insurmountable challenges.
Will Grill’d succeed in the drive-thru market? While it remains to be seen whether they’ll reach the same storied heights as larger competitors, their story remains optimistic. From humble starts as healthy burgers in Hawthorn, the new pivot towards drive-thru opens an exciting new chapter for burger lovers across Australia.