Running a restaurant today is a grind.
Food costs are climbing, consumers are tightening their wallets, and the margin for error has basically vanished. Fast food used to be the easy, affordable default for everyone. Now? You have to fight for every visit.
With fewer visits to earn, every interaction has to earn the next one. That’s why today we’re introducing Drive-Thru AI by Solink—a new way for QSR operators to deliver the kind of experience that keeps guests coming back.
Guests make up their minds fast. Research suggests most customers decide whether to stay in a drive-thru lane within 30 seconds of joining it. A long queue at the menu board isn’t just a backlog; it’s the reason a customer switches to a competitor down the street.
It may sound trite, but in the drive-thru, every second counts. According to QSR Magazine, every five-second delay can add up to $9,500 in annual losses per store.
Couple that with the fact that the drive-thru accounts for more than 70% of revenue at most locations, and it’s clear: this is where the relationship with a guest is made or broken. Speed, accuracy, and throughput matter more than most operators have the data to measure.
So, why is this happening? Surely if the drive-thru is this vital, operators would invest whatever they can to make it a success.
And they are—the problem is that the technology they’ve invested in hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.
Loop timers are underground sensors that trigger when they detect the weight of a car. They are embedded in pavement and anchored to fixed detection points—typically the menu board and the service window. While these are vital spots, they aren’t enough. Modern drive-thrus vary in size and shape; some have dual lanes with merge points, pull-ahead zones, or long “stack zones” to queue cars before they even reach the menu.
Loop timers have little to no visibility into these areas. They also can’t tell when a car leaves the lane prematurely. Low visibility is one thing, but having a blindspot into “drive-offs” is the type of data gap that results in thousands of dollars in wasted inventory.
The hardware itself is also fragile. Weather damages it. Wear degrades it. Maintenance requires closing the lane, digging up pavement, and waiting for a technician. When a loop timer goes offline, your performance monitoring goes with it. As faulty as they are, loops have become a “necessary evil” simply because they’re the industry standard.
