Like many restaurant chains, the 40-unit Velvet Taco has been building restaurants for some time with drive-thru lanes designed to make it easy and fast for guests to pick up meals ordered ahead online or through the app as members of the loyalty program, The Velvet Room.
About 20 of the chain’s units have drive-thru pickup windows. And it worked. The pickup time through those windows was about 24 seconds, said CEO Clay Dover. “You’d literally roll up and your food would be ready, because we would tell you it was ready,” he said. “We’d hand it to you, and you’d go on your merry way.”
But the folks at Velvet Taco soon learned they had a problem.
Those lanes were not designed for ordering. Just for pickup. That’s what makes them so speedy. But some guests didn’t understand that.
Those guests would drive in, hoping to order in the style of a traditional drive-thru, but there was no speaker box or menu board. When they got to the window, the cashier would ask for their name, assuming the guest had arrived to pick up. But that cashier couldn’t take an order.
Instead, that guest would be given a QR code to download the Velvet Taco app. They were instructed to pull out of the lane and then order. Then they’d have to either drive thru again, or step inside the restaurant to pick up their meal.
Too often, those guests would simply drive away and find somewhere else to eat, said Dover, and that happened about 22% of the time.
Now, however, Velvet Taco has a solution.
Enter the Taco Lane, which is Velvet Taco’s new-and-improved version of the drive-thru. It’s a feature of the latest three restaurants to open, including the chain’s 40th location, which opened this week in Oklahoma.
The new Taco Lane makes it clear guests can order./Photo courtesy of Velvet Taco.
The new Taco Lane units have signage and menu boards. Cashiers are trained to take orders, using a hand-held terminal, and take payment at the window. And because the typical transaction takes about five- to eight minutes—these are tacos, not burgers—there are dedicated parking spots where guests can sit to wait for their food, which is run out to cars.
Those who order ahead can also still speed through and pick up from the same window.
“So it is totally different from what we had been doing,” said Dover. “This was a realization that guests wanted to access our brand, and it’s our job to meet them wherever they wanted to be.”
These are operational challenges worth figuring out, given that takeout and delivery account for about 51% of sales at Velvet Taco. With average unit volumes of about $4.2 million, roughly half of those sales are leaving the premises.
Going forward, about two thirds of restaurants will have a Taco Lane or pickup window, and some will have two lanes, one in which guests can place an order and another devoted solely to pickup, Dover said. In some cases, the brand will go back and retrofit existing restaurants, though that may take time.
Dover said it’s clear the drive-thru trend is here to stay. “But we don’t want people to think we’re a fast-food restaurant,” he said. “There’s a level of commitment to the experience, the training, the interaction. We serve margaritas. We play music. We’re open late at night.”
The chain has tried to remove friction in other ways. QR codes at tables allow guests to order and pay using their smart phones without getting in line, for example. Next, they might look at kiosk ordering, Dover said. Down the road, there may even be all-digital Velvet Tacos.
For now, Velvet Taco wants to make sure they aren’t losing any guests looking for Chicken Tikka tacos, or whatever the special taco of the week may be, without leaving their car.