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While burger chains grew just 1.4 percent in 2024, chicken-centric QSRs grew nearly 9 percent. Needless to say, the category is booming. The brands pulling ahead aren’t just riding that wave—they’re building operations designed to scale it. And increasingly, that means going all in on kiosks.

Chicken’s Moment Is Here (And It’s Not a Blip)

The numbers tell a clear story. According to Datassential, the limited-service chicken segment is now the fastest-growing major QSR category by unit count, expanding at a 4.4 percent annual rate with sales reaching $55.24 billion in 2025. Chicken now accounts for roughly 12 percent of all U.S. chain restaurant sales, up from 7 percent in 2015—a share gain that would be staggering in almost any other category.

QSR Magazine’s 2026 QSR 50, the industry’s annual benchmark for chain performance, reinforces why. Wingstop posted $4.8 billion in 2024 sales with 20 percent same-store sales growth and 278 net new units. Chick-fil-A added 178 net new units in 2025 alone. These aren’t outliers. They’re indicators of where franchise capital and consumer attention are flowing.

The momentum is holding even as the broader fast-food sector struggles. Placer.ai data shows chicken chains were among only three QSR segments to grow visits in the first half of 2025, even as burger traffic fell 1.7 percent and sandwich concepts dropped more than 3 percent.

Investments follow the consumer data. 

• Jollibee, the Filipino fast-food giant, signed three multi-unit franchise agreements in the U.S. in H1 2026 alone and is targeting 500 U.S. locations by 2030.
• Slim Chickens is rolling out 50 new UK locations in 2026 while aggressively expanding through Texas.
• Bonchon, with more than 147 U.S. locations, is pushing into Kansas City, San Antonio, Chicago, and Omaha. 
• Big Chicken, the fast casual founded by Shaquille O’Neal, continues to accelerate its national footprint.

All four have heavily invested in kiosks to meet their customers’ preference in ordering.

There’s a more nuanced picture beneath the headline growth, though. Foot traffic per location has declined across the category as brands have raced to open units. What that signals: raw expansion alone doesn’t protect margins. The operators positioning themselves to win long-term are building better unit economics, not just more units. Kiosks are a meaningful lever in how they’re doing it.

Why Chicken Menus Are Built for Kiosk Ordering

Not every restaurant category benefits equally from kiosks. Chicken concepts do.

The reason is menu architecture. Chicken concept menus are customization-heavy by nature: spice levels, sauces, bone-in or boneless, sandwiches or tenders, combo configurations, and seasonal LTOs. 

At a front counter, that complexity creates friction. A guest takes longer to decide, the cashier slows to accommodate, and the line backs up. On a kiosk, that same complexity becomes an asset. The guest can browse, explore options, and modify their order at their own pace, all while the visual merchandising does the selling that a counter employee simply can’t replicate under volume.

This matters especially for culturally rich menus. Jollibee and Bonchon bring globally influenced flavor profiles with nuanced modifier options—the kind of menu that benefits enormously from a visual, self-guided ordering experience where guests can learn as they order, not just transact.

There’s a throughput argument, too. Chicken concepts often see compressed, high-volume windows at lunch and dinner. Kiosks absorb order volume independently, reduce the queue, and give kitchens more predictable ticket flow without requiring additional front-of-house labor.

Starbird Built the Playbook

Starbird Chicken is the clearest proof point the industry has for what a kiosk-first chicken concept looks like in practice.

The Silicon Valley-born chicken brand began piloting Bite kiosks in 2019. When COVID hit six months later, they accelerated the rollout—deploying kiosks outside locations as a contactless ordering solution. What started as a response to circumstance became a strategic advantage. Today, Starbird operates three to four Bite kiosks in over a dozen of its locations, and is designing new restaurants with kiosks as the primary ordering method.

The results are measurable. Between 60% and 70% of all in-store orders at Starbird now flow through Bite kiosks. And the platform has become something beyond an ordering tool—it’s their primary guest data acquisition channel.

By integrating Bite kiosks with Attentive’s SMS platform, Starbird grew their subscriber list 6X in just six months. Of their 136,000 total SMS subscribers, more than 108,000 — nearly 80%—opted in via kiosk. Those kiosk-acquired subscribers have become their highest-performing SMS audience.

“Integrating Bite’s kiosk technology with Attentive has been a game-changer for us,” said Casey Hilder, Director of Marketing at Starbird. “It’s allowed us to build a stronger connection with our customers, delivering timely, personalized messages that enhance their experience and keep them engaged with the Starbird brand.”

The Compounding Benefits: Check Size, Loyalty, Speed

The financial case for kiosk ordering in chicken concepts compounds quickly.

Bite Lift, Bite’s AI-powered upsell engine, analyzes each transaction in real time and surfaces contextual recommendations—a sauce upgrade, a larger combo, an add-on that pairs with what’s already in the cart. Across Bite’s customer base, Bite Lift consistently drives a 20 percent or greater increase in average check size. At a chicken brand averaging a $12 to $16 ticket, that lift adds up fast across a multi-unit footprint.

Order accuracy improves as well. Guests entering their own orders—especially complex, multi-modifier ones—eliminate the miscommunication that causes re-fires and comps. In a category where margins are already under pressure from ingredient costs and labor, removing that friction from the kitchen is material.

Then there’s the loyalty flywheel. Starbird’s experience shows that kiosks are an underutilized opt-in channel. Guests who are engaged enough to visit in-store are exactly the audience brands want in their SMS and loyalty programs. The kiosk catches them at the right moment, in the right context.

Building for the Category’s Next Chapter

The chicken QSR segment is still early in its expansion cycle. New units will continue to open, menus will get more complex, and competition for the same guest will intensify. The operators who build smarter infrastructure now will outperform those who try to retrofit it later.

That means designing new locations with kiosks as primary ordering channels. It means using kiosk data to understand what guests actually order, which upsells convert, and which LTOs are working in which markets. And it means treating the kiosk as a guest relationship tool, not just a transaction terminal.

The brands already doing this—Starbird, Bonchon, Slim Chickens, Big Chicken, Jollibee—are some of the fastest-scaling names in the category. That’s not a coincidence.

If you’re building or growing a chicken concept, see what Bite can do for your operation.

Restaurant peak season staffing is one of those problems that looks like a headcount problem from a distance and a systems problem up close.

Every summer, operators face the same math: more covers, more dayparts, more pressure — and the same constrained pool of available labor to cover it. The instinct is to hire more people. Sometimes that’s right. But the operators who consistently perform well during their busiest months aren’t just the ones who staff up the fastest. They’re the ones who think harder about where their people are deployed, how their systems absorb front-of-house pressure, and how they build a staffing model that doesn’t require everything to go right in order to hold together.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

The Labor Market Doesn’t Get Easier in Summer

According to the National Restaurant Association’s 27th annual Eating and Drinking Place Summer Employment Forecast, restaurants are projected to add 490,000 seasonal jobs this summer, making the industry the second-largest source of seasonal employment in the country, behind only construction. But the conditions operators are hiring into haven’t gotten friendlier. 

The NRA’s 2025 State of the Restaurant Industry report found that 77% of operators say recruiting and retaining employees is still a leading challenge, and that pressure doesn’t ease when summer volume ramps up. The truth is, it compounds. Corporate sets the headcount budget and scheduling guardrails. Regional operators own the execution problem when those budgets don’t stretch to match what summer actually demands. 

The result is a familiar tension: more covers moving through locations that are already running lean, managed by a mix of returning staff and seasonal hires who are still finding their footing. The question at the end of the day is how to structure the operation so that it performs regardless of the challenges.

Seasonal Hires Belong in the Right Roles, Not Just Available Ones

Here’s a staffing mistake that plays out every summer across multi-unit operations: a new seasonal hire gets put on the register because that’s where the immediate coverage gap is. They’re slower, they make more errors, and every fumbled order adds to the line behind them.

The instinct is understandable. You have a body, and you have a gap—you fill it. But new hires have the highest error rates and the steepest learning curves, and the register during a summer lunch rush is one of the highest-stakes, highest-visibility roles in the building. Putting inexperienced staff there doesn’t solve the throughput problem. It compounds it.

The smarter deployment is to assign seasonal and newer hires to roles where the risk of error is lowest and the need for execution speed is highest: food running, bussing, expo support, lobby management. These roles contribute directly to throughput and guest experience without putting new team members in positions where a slow transaction or a misheard order backs up the entire front of house.

That redeployment logic only works, though, if your experienced staff aren’t pinned to the counter. Which is where the technology question becomes a staffing question.

Kiosks Change the Labor Equation at the Counter

When kiosks are handling a significant share of order intake, the staffing equation at the front of house shifts. Counter staff don’t disappear—they just move. And where they move is the decision that separates operators who get real leverage from their kiosk investment from those who just have kiosks in their lobby.

According to Restaurant Dive’s coverage of major QSR kiosk deployments, restaurants that feature kiosks redeploy labor so employees can focus on preparing food, reducing the need for front counter staff to take orders. The value isn’t just labor reduction, it’s labor reallocation toward the roles that actually move throughput during a rush.

Bite’s partnership with Urbane Cafe is a practical example of what this looks like at scale. Through their kiosk deployment, Urbane Cafe has been able to shift team members away from order-taking and toward the guest-facing hospitality roles that define the brand experience. It’s a reallocation in practice that makes a real-world difference in the guest experience and their bottom line. 

There’s a compounding benefit during summer specifically: Bite kiosks deliver 99% order accuracy regardless of volume. During the weeks when your most experienced staff are stretched thin and newer hires are filling gaps, that consistency matters. 

Cross-Train Before You Need To

One of the clearest operational levers for peak season isn’t hiring, it’s preparation. With 77% of operators citing recruiting and retaining as a leading challenge, per the NRA’s 2025 State of the Restaurant Industry report, most operations are heading into summer already running below their ideal staffing depth. Cross-training is the primary way to build flexibility into a team that may not be at full strength when volume peaks.

For multi-unit operators, the timing of cross-training matters as much as the practice itself. Cross-training done in May, before summer volume ramps up, builds the flexibility your locations need in July. Cross-training attempted during a peak rush is training under duress. It’s slower, less effective, and more likely to create the errors you were trying to prevent.

The practical implication looks like this. Identify your highest-risk coverage gaps by location before peak season and run cross-training against those specific gaps. Which roles go sideways first when volume spikes? Which team members are closest to being capable in those roles with a bit of preparation? Those are the investments that pay off when it matters.

Schedule Against Data, Not Last Year’s Anecdotal Memory

Operators who build their peak season staffing plans around a general sense of “summer is busy” rather than actual daypart-level data are solving the wrong problem. Summer volume isn’t uniform. It’s specific. Tourist-heavy locations see patterns that commuter corridors don’t. Weekend dinner service in June looks different from weekday lunch in August. The locations that struggle during peak season are often the ones scheduled for average expectations rather than the actual demand their specific location and daypart combination generates.

Transaction data by location, day of week, and daypart is the most actionable staffing tool that most operators aren’t fully using. Where does ticket time consistently fall apart? Which locations are running thin coverage during their highest-volume windows? Which dayparts are generating more orders than the current staffing model can absorb cleanly?

Bite’s Sales and Analytics Dashboard surfaces exactly this data—location-level and daypart-level transaction visibility that gives corporate and regional teams the information to schedule more precisely against actual demand. The goal isn’t to staff for the average week. It’s to staff for the hard weeks without blowing the labor budget on the easy ones.

Build for the Hard Weeks, Not the Best-Case Scenario

Peak season staffing plans that only work when everything goes right aren’t plans—they’re optimistic projections. Someone calls out. A seasonal hire doesn’t show. A location gets hit with an unexpected volume spike on a Tuesday. The operations that hold together under those conditions aren’t the ones with the most people on the schedule. They’re the ones with the most flexibility built into the model.

That flexibility comes from a few places: cross-trained staff who can cover multiple roles without a full retraining cycle, kiosk coverage that doesn’t depend on who showed up that morning, and scheduling visibility that surfaces gaps before they become a problem on the floor. It also comes from being honest about where your single points of failure are—the roles, the locations, and the dayparts where one staffing problem tumbles into a guest experience problem.

Peak season tests every part of your operation—staffing most of all. The operators who perform consistently during their busiest months have figured out that it’s not really a headcount problem. It’s a deployment, technology, and planning problem. Get those three things right, and the headcount you have goes a lot further.

Peak season fills seats. But filling seats doesn’t automatically mean better margins. For multi-unit operators trying to maximize restaurant revenue during peak season, that gap is where the real work happens.

The operators who grow revenue during their busiest months have figured out something important: volume creates opportunity, but only if your systems are built to capture it. More covers moving through your locations generate more chances to grow the check, introduce a premium add-on, and push a high-margin item. Miss those moments consistently across hundreds of orders, across dozens of locations and you’ve left meaningful revenue on the table during the period you could least afford to.

Here’s how the best operators close that gap.

High Volume Is When the Human Upsell Breaks Down

There’s a counterintuitive reality about peak season that most operators recognize but rarely address directly: the busier your locations get, the less reliable your staff-driven upselling becomes.

When a line stretches to the door, and a team member is focused on moving guests through as fast as possible, suggestive selling is the first thing that goes. It’s not a training failure—it’s physics. A cashier managing a lunch rush doesn’t have the bandwidth to work through a thoughtful upsell opportunity for every order. They take the order, process the payment, and move on. It’s the right call for throughput. It’s a quiet revenue leak at scale.

This is precisely why peak season is the highest-leverage moment for kiosk upselling. The kiosk doesn’t experience a lunch rush the same way a team member does. It surfaces the same well-configured upsell prompt on the 400th order as it did on the first, consistently, without fatigue, and without skipping steps when the lobby fills up. That consistency is where the revenue case for kiosk technology is most concrete.

What Kiosk Upselling Actually Does to the Check

The check lift data on kiosk ordering is well established at this point. Industry operators report average check increases from kiosks ranging from 15 to 30 percent, depending on whether the kiosk experience is optimized for speed of service or upselling, according to QSR Magazine’s coverage of operator deployment data. 

The act is straightforward. Kiosks surface add-on prompts at the moment of highest purchase intent—after the main item is selected, and before the order is confirmed. They don’t rely on a team member remembering to mention the side, the upgrade, or the seasonal add-on. They do it every time, for every order, based on what the guest has already selected.

Yum Brands CFO Christopher Turner said in a 2023 earnings call: “Kiosks not only drive a higher check compared to our traditional front counter, but also drive higher margins through operational efficiencies and generate new opportunities to leverage customer data and create personalized ordering experiences.” 

Restaurant Dive’s coverage of that call is worth reading in full for the broader context on where major chains are placing their bets. 

Bite operators consistently see 20%+ average check lift across their kiosk deployments—a figure that reflects both upsell attachment and the broader effect of guests spending more time with the menu when they’re in control of the ordering experience.

The Upsell Logic Has to Be Built for Performance, Not Just Presence

Not all kiosk upselling is equal. A kiosk that surfaces a random add-on, or promotes items without regard for contribution margin or prep time, isn’t capturing revenue—it just adds noise to the ordering experience.

The configuration of the upsell sequence matters enormously. During peak season, when kitchen bandwidth is constrained and ticket time is a variable you can’t afford to ignore, the items you’re promoting at the kiosk need to pass two tests: they need to be high-margin, and they need to be fast. A summer LTO that takes four minutes to prep should not be the featured upsell during the lunch rush. A high-attachment add-on with a strong contribution margin that comes off the line in under a minute should be.

This is the problem Bite Lift is built to solve. Rather than static upsell rules configured once and left alone, Bite Lift uses AI to match the right add-on to the right order at the right moment. It’s the difference between an upsell sequence that was smart at setup and one that stays smart as your menu, your traffic patterns, and your guest behavior evolve across the season.

For multi-unit operators, the additional value is consistency. Upsell logic configured at the brand level performs the same way at every location.

Use Your Peak Season Data Before the Season Ends

Peak season generates more transaction volume than any other period, which means it also generates more data. Operators who aren’t actively mining that data mid-season are missing a competitive window that closes when traffic normalizes in the fall.

The most actionable analysis is straightforward: pull your item-level sales mix, your upsell attachment rates, and your daypart performance by location. Look for the gaps. Which items are being promoted but underperforming on attachment? Which locations are seeing strong check lift and which aren’t—and what’s different about each? Which dayparts are converting on upsell prompts and which are seeing guests skip past them?

Bite’s Sales and Analytics Dashboard surfaces this data at the org and location level, giving corporate and regional teams the visibility to make configuration adjustments mid-season rather than waiting for a post-mortem. The operators who come out of summer with better margins aren’t the ones who reviewed the data in September. They’re the ones who acted on it in July.

Peak season is the highest-leverage moment to close the gap between traffic and revenue. The volume is already there, but are the systems configured to capture it on every order, at every location, across every daypart? If you’re ready to see what that looks like in practice, request a demo, and we’ll show you how Bite operators are doing it.

Summer doesn’t sneak up on restaurants. Operators know the volume is coming weeks in advance. They staff up, prep more, and push harder. And yet every year, the same thing happens: lines back up, ticket times stretch, and guests who might have become regulars walk out the door before they ever place an order.

The problem usually isn’t the kitchen. It’s everything upstream of it. Ordering infrastructure that was built for a normal Tuesday. Staff positioned where they’ve always been, not where peak volume actually needs them. Systems that work fine at moderate volume and quietly break down when covers spike.

Multi-unit operators who consistently outperform during peak season aren’t just working harder. They’re running tighter systems. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

1. Walk Your Locations Before the Rush Does

The best pre-season investment costs nothing but time. Walk each of your locations during a simulated high-volume period, ideally when traffic is already elevated, and map what you see. Where do guests naturally slow down after entering? Where does the line form when the lobby gets full? Where does the ordering process visibly stall?

This matters especially for locations with kiosks. A kiosk that sits to the side of the natural guest flow gets ignored. One positioned at the point where guests decelerate after entering captures orders before a counter queue ever forms. Placement relative to entry traffic patterns has a direct impact on adoption—and adoption is what drives throughput at scale.

While you’re walking, evaluate signage and queue management too. These are consistently underdone. Guests who don’t know where to go don’t wait patiently while they figure it out, they get frustrated, they leave, or they create congestion that slows down everyone behind them.

2. Let Kiosks Handle Order Intake at Volume

Counter service has a structural limitation: it’s sequential. One guest orders, then the next. During a summer lunch rush, that constraint compounds fast.

Kiosks break the sequential bottleneck by letting multiple guests order simultaneously. The throughput math is straightforward: Four guests ordering in parallel move through the system faster than four guests waiting in line. That difference is manageable at low volume and significant when covers spike.

The industry has taken note. Shake Shack’s kiosks are now the brand’s largest and most profitable ordering channel, with kiosk checks running meaningfully higher than other in-store ordering channels—a result the chain attributed to smarter upsell sequencing through the kiosk experience. According to reporting from Restaurant Dive, a majority of QSR and fast casual guests now prefer kiosks over counter ordering when lines exceed four people—a figure that has grown significantly year over year.

For multi-unit operators still evaluating kiosk ordering ROI, peak season is the clearest test case available. The volume is real. The staff constraint is real. The question is whether your ordering infrastructure can keep pace with both.

3. Align Your Menu for Speed Before You Need To

A menu that performs well at moderate volume can become a throughput liability when summer traffic hits. Complex modifier flows, items with long prep dependencies, and poorly organized category structures all slow down the order process at the kiosk, at the counter, and in the kitchen. The effects multiply when every station is running at capacity.

Before peak season, run a practical audit. Which items drive the longest ticket times? Which modifications generate the most kitchen confusion or order errors? If you’re running summer LTOs, have those items been stress-tested at volume, or only at normal traffic levels?

On the kiosk side, this translates to deliberate merchandising decisions: which items are promoted in featured slots, how modifier screens are sequenced, and whether your default selections reduce friction or add to it. Small adjustments to item placement and modifier flow can meaningfully reduce average order duration without any changes to the menu itself. Bite’s Sales and Analytics Dashboard gives operators the item-level data to make those calls with confidence rather than gut feel.

4. Redeploy Your Team Toward Execution

When kiosks are handling a significant share of order intake, the labor freed from the counter doesn’t disappear; it shifts. The operators who get the most out of that shift are intentional about where the capacity goes.

The highest-value redeployment during peak season is toward execution: food prep, expo, and guest experience. These are the roles where speed and accuracy have the most direct impact on throughput and satisfaction, and they’re also the roles that get stretched thinnest when volume spikes. A team member who would otherwise be managing a register queue can instead focus on keeping the kitchen moving, which is where the actual bottleneck usually lives.

QSR operators increasingly view kiosk deployment as a way to improve labor flexibility, not reduce headcount. It’s a framing that holds especially during summer, when you may be onboarding seasonal staff with limited experience. Limiting new hires’ exposure to high-stakes, high-error roles at the counter while kiosks handle ordering is a meaningful risk management decision, not just a staffing one.

5. Build a Daypart Strategy Around Your Actual Peak Windows

Not all summer volume looks the same. Tourist-adjacent locations see different traffic patterns than commuter corridors. Dinner daypart extends significantly in summer, particularly near outdoor venues, retail districts, and recreation areas. Weekend volume profiles can look almost nothing like weekday ones.

Treating “summer” as a single operational condition misses the specificity that matters. Pull your transaction data by daypart, day of week, and location. Find where throughput consistently degrades—not just which locations are busy, but when and why the system slows down at each one.

Peak season rewards preparation. Operators who treat summer as a systems problem—not just a staffing problem—come out of it with better margins, better guest scores, and an operational playbook that holds up well beyond Labor Day.

If you’re evaluating how kiosk technology can support throughput and consistency across your locations, request a demo to see what Bite makes possible.