QSR Magazine: Innovation Inspires a New Era of Growth at BurgerFi

In the better burger segment of the franchising industry, BurgerFi is known for being one of the fastest growing fast casual chains. But the brand isn’t solely focused on rapid growth — it’s also committed to helping its franchisees become as successful as possible. According to a recent article in QSR Magazine, that’s why the brand has spent the past two years making improvements across its system of 105-plus locations.

One change that BurgerFi made to improve the customer — and franchisee — experience is the addition of a call center to field off-premises orders. Calls for take-out orders now go to a central location, with transactions directly linked to BurgerFi’s point-of-sale system. The brand also created a “virtual drive thru” for guests that allows customers to pick their orders up curbside. BurgerFi is building designated spots through GPS-enabled location services for the program, which is still being tested, to let employees know when a customer arrives to streamline the pick-up process.

That technology-first approach is helping BurgerFi tap into the restaurant industry’s most coveted group of consumers: millennials.

Charles Guzzetta, a franchise development manager for BurgerFi, said, “While the rest of the casual dining industry, Applebee’s, Chili’s, and those concepts are trying to do anything they can to pull in the millennial population, here we are, we have them. We need to use that to our advantage. We know that this population is digital focused. We have to be technology friendly.”

All of the improvements that BurgerFi has made to its franchise system are designed to help propel growth going forward. The better burger brand is planning to open another 15 to 20 stores before 2018 comes to a close, with another 25 to 30 slated to open in 2019.

“If you don’t have a stake in the game when you’re franchising you can get turned upside down pretty quick,” said Paul Griffin, BurgerFi’s director of culinary. “You’ve got to stay on top of the system. You need to be able to do the system better than anybody else in order to be able to teach it and keep it running. If you start running the other way and you’ve got two stores and 100 franchises, you can get bullied pretty quickly.”

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