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By the time Jenn Allstun, senior principal design lead for restaurant development at Chik-fil-A, steps into a new project, she knows the end goal will likely require a bit of moving and shaking. Her world is now defined by elevated kitchens hovering over multilane drive-throughs, compact urban walk-ups that never see a cash register, and a South Florida pipeline of restaurants designed to feel as rooted in place as they are relentlessly efficient.
The puzzles have grown more complex, but they’re also more aligned than ever with the questions she has spent her career trying to answer: How do you marry regional character, digital convenience, and hospitality in a brand that serves millions of guests every day?
Vertical Kitchens and the New Drive-Through
Chick-fil-A’s most audacious recent move is a new elevated drive-through concept, where the kitchen sits on a second level and four drive-through lanes thread beneath the building like a highway interchange designed for chicken sandwiches.
The footprint is about the size of a traditional freestanding restaurant, but the vertical arrangement gives space back, allowing the brand to handle two to three times the volume of a standard drive-through in markets where demand has long outgrown the asphalt.
Two of the lanes are dedicated Mobile Thru channels, built around the Chick-fil-A app and QR-code check-ins, while the other two serve guests who order on site with team members stationed along the lane.
Conveyors carry orders from the upstairs kitchen down to the lanes, and the architecture is deliberately choreographed to keep traffic legible, no small feat when hundreds of cars per hour are arriving with different expectations and order types.
For a design leader like Allstun, these prototypes are a distillation of longstanding priorities that make Chick-fil-A what it is: clear wayfinding, operational precision, and a built environment that makes a high-pressure experience feel surprisingly calm.
Walk-Up Urban Labs and a South Florida Testbed
If the elevated prototype pushes the drive-through to its logical extreme, the brand’s new walk-up formats do the same for dense urban cores. In New York City, Chick-fil-A has opened its first all-digital mobile pickup restaurant, a compact storefront with no seating, no kiosks, and no front counter, only app orders and a tightly organized pickup experience.
Every square foot is devoted to moving digital orders in and out, turning the restaurant into a live lab for how guests actually behave when the only front of house is a pickup shelf.
Nowhere is the convergence of these trends more apparent than in South Florida, where Chick-fil-A is layering new restaurants onto an already busy landscape while upgrading existing ones to match its next-generation standards. In 2025, the company announced two new restaurants, Chick-fil-A Deerfield Beach and Chick-fil-A University at Sunrise, each called out their multilane drive-throughs designed to speed service during intense peak periods. At the same time, Chick-fil-A Pompano Beach is being completely rebuilt, a full reset that highlighting how seriously the brand is taking retrofit opportunities in established markets.
Further south, four new Miami-area restaurants, Coconut Palm, Homestead, Cutler Bay, and Pinecrest, opened over the last two years, adding more than five hundred jobs and effectively filling in gaps in a region that has historically been underserved by the chain.
For Allstun and her peers, this cluster of projects creates an ideal proving ground in coastal climates, diverse communities, and site conditions that rarely resemble the generous pads of suburban prototypes. It’s the perfect canvas for the Caribbean-influenced forms, alternative palettes, and high-throughput drive-through configurations that define Chick-fil-A’s next chapter in design.
Designing for Digital Hospitality
What unites these moves is the recognition that digital demand is now a major driver in customer expectations. Chick-fil-A leaders have framed the new formats as a targeted format strategy, a way to show up differently in different markets while preserving the hospitality that has long defined the brand. For design, that means rethinking circulation, signage, and spatial hierarchy so that guests who ordered 20 minutes ago on their phone and guests who just turned in from the street both feel expected, not squeezed in.
In the elevated prototype, that might mean separating Mobile Thru lanes visually and physically, so app users glide through without worry. In all-digital urban units, it might mean using lighting, material shifts, and simple digital prompts to reassure guests that their order is in the right place and on the right track.
These are the seams where Allstun’s operational literacy and relationship-driven approach to collaboration become most visible. Kitchens must work for team members, queuing must work for operators, and the architecture must work for communities that are increasingly sensitive to congestion and visual clutter.
“Through structured flexibility, Jenn Allstun creates Chick-fil-A restaurant designs that draw from their communities and enrich the guest experience,” says Eric Crane, director of sales and design at CFX Products. “Her work shows that great design isn’t just built, it’s told, lived, and shared.”
As new prototypes open and older restaurants are rebuilt, the puzzles will keep multiplying: more parcels to solve, more neighborhoods to understand, more channels to integrate. For a designer who has always thrived at the intersection of constraints and creativity, that’s not a complication—it’s the point.
CFX Products supports leading quick-service and retail brands through the design and manufacture of precision casework and architectural millwork systems. In addition to the built systems and materials that define a space, we account for the operational realities, guest-flow patterns, and brand expressions that unfold within it. This holistic approach, supported by a vertically integrated model, bridges the gap between conceptual design and real-world execution; providing engineering, fabrication, logistics, and install support through a single accountable partner. With international reach and a specialization in high-volume, brand-standard environments, we help clients maintain design intent while achieving consistency, performance, and operational efficiency at scale.
Our work is strengthened through collaboration with industry leaders such as Jenn Allstun, Senior Design Lead at Chick-fil-A. Jenn’s emphasis on structured flexibility and community-informed design aligns with our mission to deliver spaces that reflect both brand standards and the character of the neighborhoods and guests they serve. Together, we help bring environments to life that are operationally sound, thoughtfully executed, and centered around the guest experience.
