The Fast Food Chain With A 2-Story, 4-Lane Drive-Thru

Chick-fil-A is known for its extraordinarily popular drive-thrus. With customers clamoring for those chicken sandwiches, it's received the dubious honor of having the longest drive-thru lines in the country (although its customers still report a high level of satisfaction, despite an average eight-minute waiting time). So it's perhaps unsurprising that the chain has turned its efforts to developing a whole new drive-thru model — one that features a two-story building and a whopping four lanes, with room for 75 cars.

This new drive-thru opened in August 2024 near Atlanta; as of late 2024, it's the only one in the country — although rival chain Taco Bell (which incidentally, has the fastest drive-thru service) opened a similarly large drive-thru in suburban Minnesota back in 2022. When it opened, the company said it has capacity for double to triple the average Chick-fil-A restaurant, but it's not just about size — it's also designed to serve up food faster than your average Chick-fil-A. It's little wonder the chain would want to get that drive-thru speed up, since drive-thrus reportedly make up 60 percent of the chain's sales. It's also designed so that customers are corralled in different directions for faster service — two of the four lanes are for customers who are ordering on the spot, while the other two are for customers to pick-up advance orders from an app, as well as delivery drivers.

Although this is a two-story drive-thru, the cars all stay on ground level — the building is structured a bit like a bridge (or a tunnel, depending how you look at it), with the drive-thru lanes, ordering, and pick-up windows all at ground level, and the main restaurant above covering some of the lanes. That upper level houses a kitchen that's double the size of the average Chick-fil-A — but you can't go in there, as there's no dining room here. (There is a restroom, though, in the corner of a parking lot.) 

That building also has lots of windows for staff, making it a generally more pleasant working environment. The food they make upstairs is sent down to the drive-thru level via a conveyor belt system. This system can reportedly send down a meal every six seconds. At the moment, this giga-drive-thru is considered just a prototype by the company — there's no indication yet that the company is planning to build more of them, although its executives are apparently hopeful that more will happen. It's one of two new restaurant formats that Chick-fil-A has tried recently — the other is a pick-up-only location in New York City, where customers have to order in advance online (although the pick-ups are on foot, not in a car).