“Drive-thru” is honestly starting to feel like an outdated name for what’s happening in QSR.
In 2020, digital ordering accounted for roughly 20% of QSR sales. By 2025, industry forecasts projected that number could surpass 50%.
Customers increasingly start the transaction before they ever reach the restaurant through mobile apps, delivery platforms, loyalty systems, and now emerging AI ordering channels. Starbucks says mobile ordering now drives roughly 31% of U.S. transactions, and brands like Chipotle are continuing to expand pickup-first formats built around pre-arrival ordering.
The drive-thru used to be where ordering happened. Increasingly, it’s becoming where fulfillment happens.
A few weeks ago, we talked about “winning the meal moment”, the idea that customers increasingly choose whatever solves their immediate need fastest and with the least friction. And if that’s true, the fastest possible experience may eventually become one where the transaction starts before the customer even leaves home.
The Transaction Is Moving Upstream
Customers didn’t learn pre-arrival ordering from restaurants alone.
For decades, the drive-thru was designed around a very specific operational flow: the customer arrived first, then the transaction started.
That assumption shaped everything, from lane design and staffing models to kitchen sequencing and throughput metrics. But the customer behavior behind pre-arrival ordering was forming long before QSRs fully caught up.
Amazon introduced 1-Click ordering back in 1999. The iPhone launched in 2007. Uber arrived in 2009 and normalized real-time app-based transactions. By the mid-2010s, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub had trained customers to expect food ordering to happen from wherever they already were: the couch, the office, the passenger seat, the middle of another task entirely.
Then restaurant brands built their own ecosystems on top of that behavior. Starbucks launched Mobile Order & Pay nationally in 2015. Domino’s heavily expanded digital ordering throughout the 2010s. Chipotle introduced Chipotlanes in 2018 specifically around pre-arrival pickup behavior.
So by the time digital ordering exploded during COVID, the behavioral foundation was already there. Customers had already spent years being conditioned toward fewer steps, faster fulfillment, real-time convenience, transactions that begin instantly, and minimal interruption to whatever they were already doing.
That’s the deeper shift happening underneath QSR. Mobile ordering normalized the behavior. Delivery platforms accelerated it. Loyalty ecosystems reinforced it. Emerging AI ordering systems may push it even further.
And once customers arrive with the order already placed, the drive-thru starts carrying a very different kind of operational weight. The challenge becomes less about capturing demand and more about fulfilling it cleanly once it shows up.
The Same Drive-Thru Now Has Multiple Customer Journeys
Pre-arrival ordering is creating separate operational flows inside the same lane.
Most people have probably experienced this already without really thinking about it: placing a mobile order ahead of time, getting to the restaurant, and then sitting behind several traditional drive-thru orders anyway.
Operationally, those are no longer the same customer journey.
One customer is still starting the transaction at the menu board. The other already completed most of it before arriving. Yet in many cases, both customers still get pushed through the exact same physical and operational flow.
That’s where the operational side starts getting interesting.
At Berry AI, pre-arrival orders are increasingly measured separately from traditional drive-thru traffic entirely. Dashboards identify when mobile or pre-arrival customers arrive, allowing operators to track fulfillment timing, congestion, and handoff efficiency independently from the standard drive-thru ordering flow.
Many of our operators have jumped on the trend of creating dedicated mobile ordering lanes and separate pickup flows specifically for pre-arrival customers to tackle that very mix-up in the lane. And these operators are seeing some solid success.
The Metrics Need to Change Too
Traditional drive-thru metrics were built around the ordering interaction itself.
Historically, drive-thru performance was heavily centered around the ordering process: speaker response time, order completion time, cars processed per hour, upsell rates, and total lane time.
That made sense when the drive-thru primarily functioned as an ordering system. But in a pickup-first environment, many of the operational bottlenecks move elsewhere.
Starbucks has already acknowledged that rising mobile ordering volume created operational strain around order sequencing, congestion, and pickup coordination inside stores. Chipotle’s continued expansion of Chipotlanes reflects the same broader shift: restaurants increasingly designing infrastructure around fulfillment rather than traditional ordering interactions.
As more transactions begin before arrival, operational visibility of the drive-thru may become even more important, not less.
Because the challenge increasingly becomes understanding when customers arrive, how pickup surges impact throughput, where congestion forms, how labor is allocated, and whether fulfillment timing actually matches demand patterns in real time.
In other words, restaurants may eventually need to rethink not just how they measure speed, but what “drive-thru performance” actually means in the first place.
“Drive-Thru” and “Fly By”
Future fulfillment models are challenging the assumption that someone is physically driving at all.
At the moment, most pre-arrival ordering still relies on a customer eventually arriving at the restaurant in a car. But even that assumption may slowly start changing.
Drone delivery pilots already exist through companies like Wing and Zipline. Autonomous delivery programs continue expanding across both restaurant and grocery ecosystems. And AI assistants are increasingly being integrated into ordering experiences themselves.
Meanwhile, the broader direction of the industry already points toward reducing friction between the customer deciding they want food and the restaurant fulfilling that demand.
That doesn’t mean the drive-thru will disappear. There will always be people who like the convenience of picking up food while they’re out and about.
But it may mean the operational role of the drive-thru continues to be refined over time: less focused on ordering, more focused on staging, pickup coordination, handoff efficiency, and fulfillment logistics.
At some point, the larger operational question may stop being “How fast can we take the order?” and become “How efficiently can we fulfill demand regardless of how it arrives?”
