Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A uses 100s of sensors and ML to squeeze 3x output from each store

Chick-fil-A's stores get 3x the demand they were designed for. Since predicting demand by schedule failed (too many external variables), they wired stores with hundreds of sensors feeding a model that tells workers in real time to, say, drop more fries.

“But the actual usage, the demand is so high for Chick-fil-A that we get 3 times more output than the store was designed for. And he's like, so how do we do that? Right? Once you design the store, it's kind of— it's already built. You can't really go back and change it. So we've had to use technology to get 3x the output that the thing was designed to do.”

Spin Chick-fil-A's store-AI out and sell it to every restaurant chain

Shaan's 'export framework' idea: the engineers who built Chick-fil-A's in-store ML should spin out and generalize it into a product. Chick-fil-A spent years and tens of millions building it; package it for every other restaurant.

“the engineers working on that should spin out of Chick-fil-A and then go offer this as a service to every other restaurant is basically like, hey, Chick-fil-A spent $50 million over the last 5 years developing the technology to make their store smarter. So we generalized it and it's a product for you, right? That's my, my old export framework. They should export this idea from Chick-fil-A”

Steal thisTake a capability a big company spent millions building in-house, generalize it, and sell it to the rest of the industry.

Chick-fil-A does ~$2.5M per store, the highest of any fast food chain

Shaan notes Chick-fil-A has the highest revenue per store of any fast food chain at roughly $2.4-2.5M, and credits its quality to a franchising model where you must apply, be the sole operator, and can't run it as a passive side investment.

“So I started looking at it and basically Chick-fil-A has the highest sort of revenue per store of any fast food chain. They do like $2.5 million, $2.4 million or something like that per store, which is insane. That's cool. And then they have a pretty cool model, which is you can't just get a Chick-fil-A. So one of the reasons why the quality's so high is they, did franchising differently. So if you want to be a franchisee of Chick-fil-A, you have to like apply.”