A Look Inside McDonald's Restaurant And Drive-Thru Simulation Labs
It takes a lot to be a fast-food behemoth like McDonald's. Things like marketing, research, innovation, testing, teaching, product development, and technology all come into play. Fortunately, the brains behind the Big Macs have a place where they can gather to do all those things. They can simulate a wide variety of restaurant scenarios all within one massive facility: McDonald's Speedee Labs.
These labs fill two floors of McDonald's main headquarters (aka "MHQ") in Chicago and take up the equivalent space of over seven tennis courts. This allows ample room within the facility for two full-sized, fully staffed kitchens; test labs; a design studio; a prototyping and demo space; and a simulated drive-thru setup, complete with a wheeled car-like cart that rolls through the corporate hallways. Speedee Labs is where ideas are dreamed up and evaluated so that McDonald's restaurants around the world can serve customers to their best ability.
The more than 300 different pieces of restaurant equipment inside these labs can be easily shifted around like puzzle pieces to form a range of configurations, imitating the different arrangements of McDonald's restaurants around the globe. This is especially handy when representatives from faraway markets come to the labs to focus on concerns specific to their particular restaurants' layouts. The labs are also decked out with extremely high-tech order-taking systems, video technology, and collaboration rooms.
What else is happening inside McDonald's headquarters?
Though Speedee Labs is the latest and greatest addition to McDonald's main building, there's a whole lot more going on within the nine-story, 490,000-square-foot Chicago headquarters. There are additional labs, training facilities, and research centers, for instance. Hamburger University is an international training hub where managers and other bigwigs can come and learn how to serve a better McDonald's burger and run a successful restaurant, McDonald's-style. And the giant in-house test kitchen is where every McDonald's burger, chicken nugget, or Happy Meal gets conceived, sampled, and improved upon before graduating to the big leagues of the McDonald's menu.
To further add to the McFun, MHQ features such amenities as a staff café with amphitheater seating and free drinks. The Fan Store (as in where McDonald's devotees shop, not a place to purchase a cooling unit) lets employees browse through logo-emblazoned hoodies and Grimace tote bags. The 6,000-square-foot McDonald's Global Headquarters Restaurant, which is open to the general public as well as staffers, offers self-serve kiosks, table service, and rotating menu items from Mickey D's around the world — such as a Goat Cheese Burger from Spain or a Japanese Matcha Green Tea McFlurry. And from Muppets to Matchboxes, Legos to Little Mermaid, nearly every Happy Meal toy ever produced is proudly showcased in lighted display cases all along the facility's Happy Meal Toy Wall.