#Chipotle cascadea full#

Construction takes longer when the restaurant stays open, but Chipotle is still able to complete the remodels in a week or two, she said.

#Chipotle cascadea full#

But the team quickly innovated and partnered with its general contractors and other vendors, operations partners and facility partners to figure out exactly how it could change the construction schedule and modify restaurant hours to avoid a full closure.Įvery remodel that Chipotle did in 2021 had zero closure time, Zalotrawala said. For the first two or three projects, the restaurants were closed for three to six days. The company developed a better way to do remodels to reduce the amount of closure time, as well. It also takes total investment costs into consideration. The company will also consider whether it can get a permit from local authorities and from the unit’s landlord to approve the conversion. Chipotle will review a restaurant’s sales and comps performance to determine if there is enough room at the site to add that vehicular lane, she said. If a lease is up in less than five years, then it’s not a good candidate, she said. The company also continues to do a complete analysis of its portfolio of restaurants to figure out which ones are physically able to add a Chipotlane, Zalotrawala said.Ī lot of that process involves analyzing how long is left on a lease. “Between conversions and being clear about what we’re looking for in terms of the development strategy with our landlords and with our developers, we’ve been able to accelerate this pipeline very quickly,” Zalotrawala said. That required staff telling guests that if they ordered online, they could pick up orders from that window. During the first few months, customers didn’t realize the window was exclusively for mobile order collection, and would drive to the window to try and order. Chipotlanes typically contribute about $1 million to restaurants annually, so staff needed to be in place to run restaurants efficiently and with speed and accuracy, she said.Ĭhipotle learned quickly that it needed to acclimate consumers to the pickup windows. The operations team in the field and operation services team, which innovates around equipment, crunched numbers to see how many employees were needed on the digital makeline and how much that would cost. Staff also needed to work in the exact same manner as they did at the front lineįiguring out the right amount of labor was a learning process, she said. “Adding the Chipotlane pretty much required a redesign of our restaurant, both dining and kitchen … and that was a pretty mammoth task for us,” Zalotrawala said.ĭigital makelines needed to be an exact replica of the frontline, which for Chipotle meant making sure there were full pans that held cold and hot wells, she said. This took a lot of coordination among various departments - including the operations services team, which innovates around equipment - and the operations team in the field to see what worked and what didn’t work, she said. Construction plans had to be redrawn and the permitting processes redone, Zalotrawala said. Going back and adding a pickup window to sites that were already approved was difficult. “Wherever possible, whenever possible, we want to try to work really hard to get that pickup window.” “Our priority for development will always be the Chipotlane,” Zalotrawala said. This channel, which generates roughly 15% higher sales than a traditional Chipotle restaurant, led to a shift in real estate, construction and labor strategy, Zalotrawala said. It is also targeting 255 to 285 restaurant openings in 2023, and 80% of new restaurants in 20 will feature Chipotlanes. This year, the company is on track to open between 235 and 250 restaurants, 80% of which will have a Chipotlane, CFO Jack Hartung said in October during an earnings call. In November, Chipotle opened its 500th Chipotlanes and most of its future pipeline will contain these pickup lanes. “We could see that the sales margins and returns are far higher in restaurants that had a Chipotlane versus non-Chipotlane.” “ By 2019, we saw promise in the concept,” Zalotrawala said. Chick-fil-A, which had the worst speed of service time of those brands, came in at 325 seconds.

Taco Bell’s drive-thru speed of service time averages 221 seconds, for example, which is the fastest restaurant drive-thru time for 2022, according to a QSR Magazine report on the 10 quickest drive-thru chains. Transactions at a Chipotlane take less than 30 seconds, far less than a traditional drive-thru, Zalotrawala said.

The chain leveraged its app and online ordering capabilities to let customers order their food without waiting in line behind another car or giving their order to a speaker box, Zalotrawala said.

One way to bring all of these elements together was a mobile order pickup window, later dubbed the Chipotlane.