Major US fast-food chains plan to aggressively add more digital order kiosks to their restaurants – and bring in bigger checks in the process.
Burger King is eyeing a huge kiosk expansion in the US after a pilot with “tremendous results,” Josh Kobza, CEO of parent company Restaurant Brands International, told investors in November. The burger giant already has kiosks at more than half of its non-US restaurants and plans to keep deploying them under plans to convert the business to “100% digital,” he said.
Shake Shack said in February that it had rolled out kiosks to “nearly all” of its almost 300 US company-operated restaurants and saw kiosk sales in the fourth quarter double year-over-year. They make up “well over” half of its in-restaurant orders at these locations, CFO Katie Fogertey told investors in November.
Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and the Habitat Burger Grill, is focusing on kiosks, too.
Customers can order at kiosks at all of Taco Bell’s US restaurants. KFC had kiosks in about 500 US restaurants at the end of 2023, “a huge step up from nearly zero only two quarters before,”
Yum! CFO Chris Turner told investors in February. KFC plans to have them in the “vast majority” of its non-China restaurants by the end of 2026, Turner said in November.
