The Futuristic Vision Of Fast Food

Nevin Barich

LOS ANGELES , February 6, 2018 (Off The Menu) – In the movie “Back To The Future Part II,” Michael J. Fox travels 30 years in the “future” to the year 2015 and goes into a restaurant called Café 80’s, where he’s immediately greeted by two television screens featuring Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev trying to upsell various menu items. During this scene, you also see another TV screen featuring Michael Jackson going through the menu to another customer and a bottle of “Pepsi Perfect” rising up in a clear plastic tube from within the counter.

While the restaurants of 2018 aren’t quite at the point of having TVs act as servers, we may not be that far off, at least in the world of fast food. Recent developments by Starbucks and McDonald’s indicate that quick service restaurants in the coming years may offer futuristic services to one degree or another.

Starbucks recently announced that it was experimenting with a cashless location inside the Russell Investments Center in downtown Seattle. A company spokeswoman said the store is the only one to test accepting “only cashless forms of payment,” and the company isn’t saying how long the experiment will last or whether it will be expanded to other locations.
“The test will help us understand how cashless forms of payment may impact our customer experience,” the spokeswoman said by email, according to an article in the Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, McDonald's announced plans to open about 1,000 new stores worldwide and speed up plans to add new self-service ordering systems, which are already in full force in both the U.S. market and several of McDonald’s international markets like Israel and Scotland.

And then there’s mobile apps that act like customer loyalty programs, allowing you to order ahead, skip the line and pay with your phone with a simple scan at the register. I recently popped into a Starbucks and there were about seven or eight people in front of me. All of them—every single one—made their purchase with their smartphone.

“Back To The Future Part II” didn’t quite predict the future accurately, but we’re on the road to a futuristic fast food landscape.

Nevin Barich is the Food and Beverage Analyst for Industry Intelligence, which can help YOU better address your own industry challenges. We invite you to come take a look at our service. Call us today at 310-553-0008 and we’ll schedule you for a 15-minute demo.

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