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New restaurant offers insight into McDonald’s future

Sarah Stowe

McDonald’s has opened a purpose-built Customer Learning Lab restaurant in Sydney’s Castle Hill, which enables customers to see what the fast food chain has in store over the next three years. 

Features of the new restaurant include a customisable burger menu known as ‘Create Your Taste,’ where customers use digital kiosks to build their own burgers from a selection of 19 ingredients.

Table service, which was adopted by the franchisees of a McDonald’s restaurant in the Illawarra region of New South Wales last February, will also be available.

Both initiatives are scheduled to be rolled out across the fast food chain’s network over the next six to nine months.

The new restaurant is the first of a series of new initiatives McDonald’s plans to implement across the country in an effort to fulfil the needs and wants of the modern customer.

Aside from the customisable burger menu and table service, the chain plans to roll out the following initiatives across all of its restaurants over the next three years:

  • Self-service digital kiosks
  • Mobile ordering app
  • Digital menu boards
  • Home delivery
  • McCaf_ barista made coffee in drive-thru

McDonald’s Australia CEO, Andrew Gregory said the change has been led by customers. “McDonald’s is innovating and changing again to meet the needs of our customers. All of our innovations have been led by Australians. What we’re really doing here is just what our customers have asked us to do.

“An important part of these restaurants is that we take customers along the journey with us and get their feedback – we want to make sure Macca’s restaurants of the future are what Aussies ordered,” he added.

Three more Customer Learning Labs are scheduled to open this year, and 10 are set to open their doors in 2015.