Responsiveness has long been a key ingredient of the Amy’s Kitchen retail food brand. When founders Andy and Rachel Berliner’s homemade pot pies grew popular and people began asking for soups and pizzas, they obliged. When customers asked for gluten and dairy-free options, they went to the kitchen and figured it out.
It’s unsurprising, then, that when customers began asking for a restaurant, the Berliners would figure out a way to make it work. Amy’s Drive Thru opened in Rohnert Park, Calif., in 2015. This week the concept opened its fourth restaurant, in Roseville, Calif.
The concept is working on its fifth and sixth locations and has plans for 25 to 30 along the west coast over the next five years.
“People kept asking them to do a restaurant,” Dave Wolfgram, Amy’s Drive Thru’s president, said in an interview. “More and more requests came in asking them to do a restaurant. In 2015 they brought it to fruition with Amy’s Drive Thru.”
The concept is a “classic, American drive-thru, reinvented,” Wolfgram said. It features burgers, fries and shakes, in addition to the pizzas, macaroni and cheese, soups and bowls for which Amy’s is well known.
But much like Amy’s retail items, everything is organic and vegetarian. Customers also have the option to make any item gluten or dairy-free or both. It makes for a costlier, more difficult restaurant. But it was important to the Berliners.
“The family wanted everything on the menu to be accessible to everybody no matter what allergy you had,” Wolfgram said. “If you had a dairy-free allergy you can come in and have a burger, fries and shake. That’s a game-changer for so many people.
“Imagine if you have 12 people on a soccer team. If someone has a gluten allergy, they can eat the same thing everybody else does.”
It’s relatively common for restaurants to license their brands for sale at retail. It’s rare for a retail brand to create a restaurant.
But the Amy’s strategy has some key advantages. For one thing, it has a loyal following of people ready to visit the concept’s locations. The newly opened Roseville location drew dozens of cars to the drive-thru along with a line out the door inside.
The company can tap into data from the Amy’s retail brand to determine the location of its most fervent customers to put new drive-thrus.
But maybe the biggest is the supply chain. Amy’s has existing relationships with organic farmers and producers that the restaurant can tap into for its menu.
That’s not easy for an upstart restaurant chain to start from scratch. “It’s really difficult to get organic vegetables and affordable enough for a $6.79 price point,” Wolfgram said. “Those relationships make it possible for us to do what we do.”
To be sure, there are challenges to such a supply chain. Weather events tend to impact organic farmers more than conventional farming. “It doesn’t mean it’s not challenging,” Wolfgram said.
Still, the demand for Amy’s Drive Thru gives the brand strong unit economics to do things that other concepts can’t or won’t.
Because the chain gives customers the option to get their items either gluten or dairy-free, or both, everything in the kitchen is broken down to four stations: Gluten-free, dairy-free, gluten-and-dairy free and traditional vegetarian.
That adds size to the kitchen, Wolfgram said, as well as labor. “But it’s important,” he said. “It’s been very well received.”
The brand also has permission to do some other rather unconventional things like, say, have living roofs with native plants, which some of the concept’s locations have. They also have lush gardens.
The company is currently working to find a way to recycle the water its restaurants use for their gardens. It is also working to cover two-thirds of its parking lots with solar to offset 70% of the restaurants’ energy use. The chain’s packaging, including its straws, is all compostable.
Amy’s Drive Thru is also a certified B corporation, which is legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their communities, workers, customers and communities, similar to companies like Ben & Jerry’s. “It was important to us,” Wolfgram said. “We’re values-driven. We’re focused on doing what’s right for the people and the planet. It was important for us to go through the audit process and confirm where we’re at.”
The brand’s decision to start as a drive-thru would prove fortuitous. Since its opening six years ago demand for such lanes has skyrocketed, which is undoubtedly making the real estate sites it would target that much more competitive. But Wolfgram, a career restaurant executive who was first brought on as an advisor before he became the restaurant chain’s president, said that landlords are attracted to Amy’s more unique offerings.
For the moment, the company is focused on the next five years. It is looking at sites “from San Diego to Seattle” for its 25 to 30 locations. “After that we’d like to spread across the country,” Wolfgram said. “We do think we’d work wonderfully on the east coast.”