F ood, glorious food! What is there more handsome? These days, if you’re eating your meal in a fast-food joint, look around—the answer might just be the chair you’re sitting on. Faced with ever-increasing customer expectations, a number of national chains are in the process of rolling out dramatically upscale redesigns for their historically unstylish restaurants. At the beginning of 2006, the big cheese itself—McDonald’s—launched a new nationwide look featuring flat-screen TVs, WiFi access, and padded armchairs. Now Dunkin’ Donuts and Kentucky Fried Chicken prototypes are spreading across the country, suggesting that soon fast food won’t be wholly without taste.
Over the past year and a half, Canton, Massachusetts–based Dunkin’ Donuts has unveiled its new design in four markets: Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Cleveland;
Nashville; and—most recently, in January—Sarasota, Florida. The new stores are subject to slight market-driven variance (indoor or outdoor freezers, one drive-in window versus two, compliance with Florida hurricane codes), but they all embody the same idea— what Jimmy FitzGerald, director of concept development for Dunkin’ Brands, calls “an industrial bakery.”
That means brighter, warmer colors—“a store that is not dark and couch-like” (read: the anti-Starbucks)—as well as improved furniture, including a wood-backed, steel-frame “European style” chair. The stores are also smaller, which drives down utility costs; moving the restrooms to the front opened up the space, allowing for views of the bakers at work and room at the counter for a bakery case and a beverage pick-up station. “What we’ve done is very non–fast food,” FitzGerald says.
The new layout is revealing; Dunkin’ is a house divided. Beverages account for the majority of business in the Northeast, while bakery products outsell beverages everywhere else, and FitzGerald was tasked with developing a national logo catering to both camps. The solution, a steaming, canted coffee cup marked “DD,” is a careful calibration. Though a trial version of the logo skewed more bakery, with the coiled mouth of the cup suggesting a cinnamon roll, FitzGerald worried it didn’t pay homage to Dunkin’s heritage pink and orange hues. But the new logo reads almost entirely beverage, and Dunkin’ continues to tweak the design.
In general, the company is walking a fine line, upgrading its look while trying to stay true to a brand that trades on a kind of caffeinated populism, a Starbucks for the Average Joe. Still, the prototypes seem to want to have it both ways.
A new Kentucky Fried Chicken prototype in Bardstown, Kentucky, is housed in a taller building with friendlier lighting, and a slimmer, kindlier Colonel.
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