Hi everyone. I have been reading all the post and stickys here for a couple days and this is my first post. I have a Pizza shop in PA. About 14 years ago we put in a drive-thru. Within 3 years we doubled our sales and we now do 3 times the business. My shop is in an area that is very spread out so delivery is not a good idea. The drive thru has been a great decision and we do 45% of our sales through it.
The owner I used to work for at Mazzio’s sister owned a Ken’s in town.
That store, I never worked for, but their drive through wasn’t nearly that lucrative…however, the restaurant is in a pretty bad location for driving in and out (actually, the “best” way to enter is a SHARP right up a very steep entrance…makes even little cars feel they’re going to roll over…it’s that or turn left over our “main drag” across 2 lanes of highway speed traffic…get the picture? haha), so that is always something to consider before implementing a DT service.
How does your drive through work? Are you a slice shop or do customers call in the order and simply pick it up at the drive-through?
Sometime back I came up with an idea of a drive thru that just did slices…Instead of a menu board you would have some LCD monitors which would show video of the slices you have at the moment…As your customers order, you can remove the slices and put them on a pan for a quick reheat in the oven…May be set-up in a trailer so you can take it to events…
We do our full menu through the drive thru. We have pizza by the “cut”. We use sheet pans and a bread dough style pizza for that. There are 28 cuts in a sheet. We have strombolis made up and ready. We also have salads, subs, and breadsticks. We have been around since 1959 so we pretty much know what to expect each day. I took over the pizza shop in 2007.
Now that we have an amazing oven we started selling thin crust pies.
Everyone loves the convenience that the drive thru offers. We are really quick too. Some days we can have 10 cars go through in a matter of 15 minutes.