Back when I started covering the restaurant industry, many years ago, we were not allowed to use the term “fast food” when referring to chains like McDonald’s or Burger King or KFC. They were instead “quick-service restaurants,” which is just a long way of saying fast food, but I wanted to keep my job so that was what I called them.
Meanwhile, this new group of restaurants had emerged, led by Chipotle Mexican Grill and Panera Bread, that established a “middle ground” between quick service and casual dining. They were called “fast casual,” which made no sense—all counter-service restaurants are, technically, casual—but the term stuck. Later on, someone decided to coin the phrase “QSR Plus,” and I’m still not quite over that.
Such terminology has traditionally been important to executives and marketing folks. “Fast food” had bad connotations. “Fast casual” is new and hot and exciting. Unsurprisingly, more than a few quick-service restaurants refused to participate in stories on quick-service restaurants because they decided they were fast-casual restaurants. Those that felt they were something “special,” meanwhile, latched onto the QSR Plus positioning.
Yet times change. And over the past two years, we’ve seen a remarkable number of alleged fast-casual restaurants adopt such definitively quick-service concepts as the drive-thru or something similar like Chipotle’s mobile-order “Chipotlanes.”
So much so, in fact, that the term “fast-casual” is obsolete. In fact, it probably should not even exist.
Traditionally, companies like Technomic used average check to differentiate the two, theorizing that higher prices meant higher quality and thus the chain should qualify as a fast-casual concept. In addition, if a concept had a drive-thru, that usually—but not always—warranted inclusion in the QSR sector.
Yet just about every fast-casual restaurant right now, including companies like Shake Shack and Sweetgreen, is looking at drive-thrus. But many concepts that have already had them, like Raising Cane’s and Portillo’s, are considered fast casual.
Meanwhile, aggressive price increases in the past couple of years have also put some traditional fast-food chains into territory previously occupied by fast-casual concepts. For this. we present the following graphic showing the average check at four concepts, two from each sector.
Average check by chain
Source: Technomic
Chick-fil-A actually has a higher average check than Raising Cane’s, and both concepts have drive-thrus. Culver’s has only a slightly lower average check than Shake Shack. While Shake Shack has only recently added a drive-thru, when you add one, it looks remarkably like the Wisconsin-based fast-food chain, at least in terms of the primary attributes.
In fact, both Culver’s and Chick-fil-A probably could lay a better claim to the “fast-casual” moniker, in part because they both offer some level of table service not often found in the other chains. And all four concepts have high-quality offerings.
“There really is a lot more blurring of the lines, especially as the nature of the business is changing,” Joe Pawlak, head of the advisory practice at Technomic, said for an upcoming episode of my podcast, A Deeper Dive. Technomic is a sister company of Restaurant Business. “At some point we’ll probably start merging those two together.”
This is not the first time we’ve harped on the pointlessness of the term fast-casual. Dare I say it will not be the last. But whatever line that existed between fast casual and fast food has completely disappeared in the past couple of years.
And maybe fast-food chains should embrace who they are, anyway. It’s become clear that consumers value the convenience such chains provide—so much so that they will pay more to get it. There is nothing wrong, in other words, with being a fast-food chain.
And that includes restaurants that call themselves “fast casual.”