Food Theory: STOP Using the Drive-Thru!

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I don’t know about you, but it seems like more and more often my orders are winding up wrong when I get them from a fast-food restaurant. Missing ingredients, missing implements, missing food, and apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed this trend.

A study back in 2021 showed that both the speed and accuracy of drive-thru service have decreased largely thanks to less experience in the workplace and increasingly complex menus. And as prices continue to go up, I personally don’t want to be wasting my time and money on incorrect orders.

So today we’re gonna be putting ordering methods to the test. Can you increase the likelihood of getting the correct order purely off of the way that you’re ordering it? Is it worth getting out of the car to actually talk face-to-face with another human being, or are drive-thrus truly the superior option?

Because really, at the end of the day, all I want is a simple cheeseburger. Easy on the lettuce, no tomato, extra onions, ketchup, mustard, and vegan mayo. Like, really, how hard is that? 🎵Intro Music🎵 🎵Explosion🎵 Hello, Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the show that always gets your order right.

Unlike literally every fast-food restaurant that I go to these days. So you know what? Today, I’m gonna do something about it. We’re gonna order a lot of food using a lot of different methods in order to calculate one very important life hack.

What is the best way to order your food at a fast-food restaurant in order to increase its accuracy? Should you go through the social anxiety of actually speaking with a person face-to-face so that you can get your order right every time?

Is that crackly speaker system in the drive-thru causing more trouble than it’s worth? Or maybe, just maybe, the right answer is one of the newer methods of ordering. Apps, curbside pickup, kiosks.

So, in order to test them all, I’ve tasked Santi, as well as a few other familiar faces from Team Theorist, to help us out. That’s right, I’m either asking my employees to eat an entire Christmas tree, or just engorge themselves all day with delicious burgers. There is no in-between when you work here.

And all of it is being done for science. And for you, so that you never have to get your order wrong ever again. So, how are we gonna go about doing this? Well, I asked Santi out in sunny Los Angeles to go to some familiar fast-food restaurants,

And then use a variety of different ordering methods to help gather some hard evidence. Obviously, top of the list was the usual suspect of McDonald’s. Pretty straightforward pick, it’s the number one fast-food chain in the country, but it’s also the one that’s been voted as the least accurate by its customers.

Our second restaurant was Wendy’s, which also happened to have itself in-person ordering, drive-thru, mobile app, curbside, and self-serve kiosks. The thought here was that it would be a good comparison to the McDonald’s numbers. And lastly, we looked at local California favorite, In-N-Out.

We went with them, one, because they’re known for their simple, highly customizable menu, and two, because Santi is a simp for In-N-Out. He’s gonna hate that I said that. Really, he is a simp for In-N-Out, but the real reason we went with them is that their accuracy is just notoriously high.

They don’t tend to have a lot of extra styles of ordering beyond just in-person and drive-thru. The expectation there was that this should allow them to be more proficient, and truly able to focus on the ways that they do take orders.

Now, this is where the episode starts to get juicy, unlike a McDonald’s burger patty. In order to really test the accuracy of each ordering method, we created a tier list of four different burgers, each with increasing levels of difficulty. First, we had the unchanged burger.

This would just be the standard burger as it comes at the restaurant. The next level was the lightly modified burger, which included an additional sauce and the removal of pickles. From there, we had the medium modified burger, which had everything from the previous tier, but with a few more additions and subtractions.

And then lastly, there was the big bad. The final boss burger, which involved a change to basically every element that came on that thing. From there, we ordered these same four burgers at every restaurant, using every available ordering method.

Except, to ensure that no one place was getting accustomed to the same weird order again and again, we went to multiple locations throughout the city to get as broad of a range of results as possible. That also helped to mitigate the other major variable in this experiment, the chefs.

Obviously, we’re not just talking about ordering methods here. There’s always going to be a human element on the other side that’s responsible for putting together the orders, and they too can very easily make plenty of mistakes. That said, by going to a bunch of different restaurants,

We ensured that no one chef was responsible for an unfair number of burgers. All that’s going to change later this year, when the completely AI-run restaurant Cali Express by Flippy opens in Pasadena, California. And you can bet that we’re going to be testing that one as soon as it opens,

But until then, you know what? This is the best that we could do to control for that variable. Once the orders were all received, we tallied up the number of mistakes to calculate the overall accuracy level, for not just the various methods of ordering, but also of these three restaurants.

And there were definitely points of shame awarded when the restaurant made a mistake that went beyond the burger. Like say, for instance, Wendy’s, for getting the fries in our very first face-to-face order. We did order fries just for funsies on the road trip while we were getting all these burgers,

While every other place gave us the fries that we asked for, Wendy’s did not. So, great start for the humans. So, right away, the face-to-face ordering got a point against it. Now, while we’re in the face-to-face category, let’s just take a look at the actual burgers themselves, shall we?

Wendy’s followed up their forgotten fries with an even rockier start, completely omitting the mustard for our lightly modified burger. And from there, the more modifications we added, the worse the whole thing got. On the next burger, we asked for no pickles, no mayo, extra mustard and onions,

And we got the exact opposite of all of that. Mayo and pickles with no mustard and fewer onions than the previous one. Honestly, we thought it couldn’t get any worse than that. But obviously, we were wrong. Because, you know, I wrote this sentence into the script.

The boss burger was meant to be a lettuce-wrapped burger with extra condiments, onions, no pickle and no tomatoes. And as you can see right here, it was literally a nothing burger. Sure, they got the no pickles and no tomato part right, but that’s only because they put literally nothing on this thing.

Except for, of course, the extra slice of cheese that no one asked for. I think it’s like learned helplessness. They’re like, oh, there’s no way we’re getting this order right, so just give them nothing. Overall, outside of the basic untouched burger, every item we ordered face-to-face from Wendy’s had at least one error.

With a grand total of ten mistakes across just four burgers. It’s crazy. Oh, and let’s not forget those fries that didn’t make it into the bag. Because they certainly did. The other two restaurants actually fared much better in the face-to-face ordering category. McDonald’s and In-N-Out both clocked in with just two errors each.

Missing some onions on one burger and sauce on another. All in all, there were 14 total errors across the 12 burgers that we ordered. And only five truly correct burgers of the bunch. That right there, that is an accuracy level of 42 percent. Which, you know, is well into failing grade status.

But hey, look on the bright side. With numbers so abysmally bad, it gives you the excuse of never having to order face-to-face at a fast food restaurant ever again. Or does it? Because guess what? The drive-thru numbers actually wound up worse. Santi’s Golden Boy In-N-Out got a bit tarnished in this round.

As they completely botched the sauce order for not just one, but two whole burgers. They also placed pickles in places where pickles were never meant to go. Get your mind out of the gutter on that one.

And while it was certainly a minor point, they also forgot to serve a straw with the drink. Wendy’s, meanwhile, also struggled in the sauce game. Missing condiments and omitting extra onions on one of the burgers that we asked for it on. And if you were hoping McDonald’s would carry, they did.

They carried the results straight into a trash fire. They forgot an entire burger. That’s right, out of the four burgers that we ordered for the test, only three were given to us. The irony of it all was that the one they forgot was the unchanged basic burger. The easiest one of the bunch.

Had it been one of the harder ones, it probably would have helped their overall score. Because boy, did they need it. Every burger we wound up with from McDonald’s had at least one error somewhere on it ranging from missing condiments to mistaken pickles.

In total, ordering through the drive-thru actually resulted in fewer overall mistakes. Eleven. But those mistakes were actually spread out over more burgers. In the end, we only wound up with four accurate burgers. Giving us the absolutely jaw-dropping error rate of 75%.

And actually it’d be worse if we consider that we only wound up with 11 burgers total. I guess the good news is that after completely collapsing like a dying star in the face-to-face order round, Wendy’s surged in drive-thrus. But McDonald’s, well, McDonald’s fell hard.

So clearly things aren’t looking too great for the fast food world. The two main ways they expected to order seem to wind up resulting in some pretty major mistakes. I mean, when your accuracy is hovering below 50% and you’re making more mistakes than you are burgers, that’s a problem.

More telling though was that even In-N-Out, the franchise that literally created the concept of a drive-thru and has a notoriously positive record for accuracy, couldn’t produce spotless results. Yeah, I actually didn’t know about this until researching for the episode, but apparently Harry Snyder, the man who founded In-N-Out alongside his wife Esther,

They launched the franchise in 1948, and then later that year introduced the two-way speaker system, which would pioneer the whole idea of drive-thru tech. Wendy’s would start using it in the 1960s, and it wouldn’t be until the ’70s that McDonald’s would finally work it into their service system. The more you know.

Anyway, for our next two rounds, In-N-Out was out and out, because it doesn’t do kiosk or app-based ordering, but could newer tech lead us to better results? Yesn’t! Let’s start with ordering via an app, shall we? Overall, curbside pickup was a bit of a welcome surprise to me.

In full transparency, I’d never done it before, because in my head, if I’m still driving all the way over to the restaurant, I might as well go through the drive-thru, because it doesn’t involve me getting out my phone, and also guarantees that my order’s as hot as possible when I get it.

Or, you know, as hot as reheated beef pucks can manage to be. But I gotta say, it wound up working really well. It was fast, it was convenient, and I didn’t have to wait in a drive-thru line that admittedly can get pretty slow at times. But that’s just talking about the experience.

What about the accuracy? Well, it was the perfect middle ground between drive-thru and face-to-face ordering, clocking in with an error rate of 62.5% across eight burgers. In total, we got three burgers that were perfectly correct, which doesn’t sound all that great when you look at it that way,

But starts to look a whole lot better when you consider the total number of errors made. As opposed to the face-to-face with 14 errors and 11 with the drive-thru, the app only resulted in six errors spread across the eight burgers, which means that mobile app ordering resulted in fewer errors per order

Than any other category thus far. And best of all, we got all our food placed in the bag. No missing fries, no missing burgers, not even a missing utensil. I feel like that should be the bare minimum standard, but after 30-plus ordering errors spread across eight separate restaurants,

You start to lower your expectations a fair bit. That said, the biggest downside of mobile app ordering was that the food came out less warm and just a wee bit soggy, because of all the time that it was left there sitting in boxes,

Steam kind of building up in there and making everything moist. Obviously, there are ways of mitigating that with experience, but it does require a little bit more strategy on your part. I’m just saying, for a day of spotty testing and disappointing results,

We were left with the option of soggy buns or no buns. And I gotta say, if that’s my choice, I am going all in on those soggy buns. Which brings us then to our final round of the experiment, the self-serve kiosk. This one also requires you to go into the restaurant

And is by far the most time and effort intensive, considering that you have to navigate a series of menus to select and customize your order. But is all that extra work worth it? Turns out the answer is an easy and definitive yes.

Being able to manually pick and choose what you want to add or remove made a huge difference in what we wound up with as a final product. So much of a difference, in fact, that there were zero mistakes at McDonald’s. Zero.

Maybe we could have gotten a few extra onions in one of the burgers or a bit lighter sauce in another, but overall what we ordered was exactly what we wound up with in the bag. Wendy’s, meanwhile, is a bit of a newcomer in the space.

While many McDonald’s have had the kiosks in place for years, there’s still a rarity at Wendy’s. So did that impact our results? No, actually. Surprising literally everyone, the Wendy’s self-serve kiosk was just as effective. They did include pickles on one of the modified burgers and another had sauce that we had requested removed.

But aside from that, the difference was clear as crystal. It was night and day. The self-serve kiosks had two errors total. A whopping six of eight burgers were perfectly delivered just as we wanted them. And not only were they right, they were also fresh. Just like with the drive-thru or a face-to-face experience,

There were no soggy buns from the food just left sitting there. In fact, the kiosks even get some bonus points thrown in for showing us customizations to the food items that we didn’t even know existed. Like the ability to add special limited edition sauces that we wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise.

Oh yeah, and for all you introverts out there, no social interaction. Perhaps the best part of this whole thing. So there you have it friends, there is in fact an optimal way to order your fast food. The numbers weren’t even close. Being able to input and review exactly what you want

Removes any doubt about what you asked for. There’s no middleman there to make mistakes in interpreting your order, who’s working mostly off of muscle memory and only half listening. The only major downfall of the kiosk system, it isn’t everywhere. Despite McDonald’s having these systems in place since 2003,

When Finding Nemo topped the box office and iTunes launched, there’s still a relative rarity. This means that obviously there’s room for growth in this market. In second place are mobile orders, where once again, you avoid the middleman. What you pick goes straight to the kitchen without having to be handled by another employee.

So the next time you’re craving a burger and fries, do yourself a favor and embrace technology. Park your car, shuffle inside, and order your four burger, small side of fries, and diet Coke without ever uttering a word. It’ll be the quietest, most accurate meal they’ve gotten from McDonald’s in a while.

But hey, that’s just a theory. A food theory. Bon appétit.