Chick-fil-A serves thousands of guests a day, each menu item packaged in a single-use container ultimately destined for recycling or landfill. With the growth of their popular chain of restaurants into new markets, they have encountered new regulatory and cultural environments that have forced their business to revisit this tried-and-true model.

Chick-fil-A leadership recognized in this challenge an opportunity to do more than simply meet the baseline requirements, but instead to build a comprehensive new vision for packaging that supports their mission to serve with excellence and integrity, make a positive impact in their communities, and lead with care. They challenged BOLTGROUP to help them craft that vision by exploring reusable and “returnable” packaging solutions, leading to a groundbreaking pilot test for an innovative returnable packaging system conducted in a key market.

As Chick-fil-A’s business grew and expanded into new markets like California, New York, and the UK, they faced increasingly diverse and complex regulations for their packaging. Some west coast markets banned single-use packaging for dine-in customers. Other states and countries were implementing strict EPR (extended producer responsibility) laws, requiring producers to make big reductions in single-use packaging. These new laws were sure to have an impact on quick-serve (QSR) and carry-out restaurants like Chick-fil-A, who rely on single-use packaging for the speed, convenience, and cost savings.

While most QSR restaurants were responding with half-measures to creep towards compliance, Chick-fil-A seized the opportunity to not just appease regulators, but to build a vision for a future where sustainable packaging enhances the guest experience and supports the business’s growth goals.

Chick-fil-A challenged BOLTGROUP to conduct research and conceptualize a new reusable, “returnable” packaging system for their restaurants. To tackle this challenge, the design team needed to think beyond the traditional quick-serve restaurant experience and envision a new system of solutions that might look wildly different from the way team members and guests use food packaging today.

Designers started by gathering insights from across the sustainable packaging landscape, studying packaging and materials from various adjacent and analogous industries, and diving deep into the emerging and pending legislation related to single-use and waste reduction in food packaging.

Next, we conducted ethnographic research in several markets, observing and talking to Chick-fil-A team members and guests to understand the challenges they might face with a future reusable system. Designers also visited innovative restaurants in highly regulated markets who were leading the charge with reusable solutions, making note of what was working well and where things fell apart. Finally, we talked to third-party reusable vendors to better understand the challenges with collecting, cleaning, and restocking the containers.

Designers then built journey maps to help visualize the various reusable, disposable, and hybrid food packaging systems employed by restaurants today, laying the groundwork to reimagine not just the packaging, but the entire food delivery system.

Through these efforts, we identified 3 major barriers to adoption for reusables in Chick-fil-A’s restaurants to be addressed in the design phase:

1. The difficulty of teaching guests to return their containers (instead of disposing) after the meal
2. The significant time and effort required to collect, sort, wash, and restock the containers
3. The immense amount of space required to store all of the used containers generated in a single day

Armed with these findings, we collaborated with the Chick-fil-A team to establish the key metrics by which our concepts would be graded and judged. These criteria guided our concept creation and selection process, ensuring we focused our efforts on the most promising ideas. With the goal to show immediate impact while also building momentum for a future-state comprehensive solution, the team decided to pursue a “tiered” approach where core products would be introduced and pilot tested first, followed by other parts of the system as the concepts are validated and refined.

The first product we developed, and the core component of the new reusable system, is an innovative reusable cup system designed to deliver an elevated feel and drinking experience, with built-in features to facilitate collection, washing, and restocking.

Space optimization was a factor to consider in the design of the reusable cups so that they nest and stack efficiently together, and within a collection system. Although the design is minimal, features such as drainage grooves were incorporated, to speed up washing and drying cycle times, reducing costs for third-party washing services.

To make the process easy and intuitive for Chick-fil-A guests, BOLTGROUP imagined an innovative collection center that could help guests sort and stack items easily and instinctively on their own, saving significant space in the dining room and reducing labor to sort containers downstream. Along with simple, clear messaging on containers, and bold visual cues at the collection station, an animated instructional video plays automatically when the guest approaches the collection station, walking guests through the process.

Chick-fil-A is currently conducting pilot tests with the initial container designs in a key market, gathering valuable data to refine and expand the system. Thanks to the comprehensive and thoughtful approach, Chick-fil-A leaders, from the corporate office to the kitchens in every restaurant, are better equipped to face the quickly evolving regulatory landscape today, with a vision for how these conceptual solutions could grow into a comprehensive system for sustainable packaging in the future.