AWS is How: McDonald’s Transforms the Drive-thru Experience

Picking up food at a drive thru provides speed and convenience—but it can sometimes be stressful. When it’s your turn to order, you have to choose from dozens of menu items, trying to find exactly what you want, as the line of hungry drivers grows longer (and more impatient) behind you.

What if, when you pulled up to the drive-thru ordering station, you got customized menu suggestions? They could help you decide what to order. And you might even discover new favorites on the menu that you otherwise would have missed.

That’s the experience McDonald’s has been rolling out to a growing number of its drive-thru locations. Using multiple AWS services for data management and machine learning, McDonald’s provides drive-thru customers with recommendations based on a variety of factors including past orders, location, and time of day.

With relevant recommendations from McDonald’s, you will be able to pull up to the digital menu board on a morning when you’re running late for work and quickly learn that the restaurant not only has freshly brewed coffee—it’s also serving that cinnamon roll that you love.

Transforming the drive-thru experience is just one piece of McDonald’s global strategy for using technology to provide customers with a faster, easier, and more rewarding experience. Working with AWS, AWS Partners, and Dynamic Yield, a McDonald’s technology company, McDonald’s has built a scalable, secure platform with which it can develop and run a wide range of new digital services for its customers. These offerings include the MyMcDonald’s Rewards program, launching later this year in the US.

Want to learn more?

Check out the latest “AWS is how” ad to see McDonald’s drive-thru recommendations in action. You can also
explore the AWS services that McDonald’s uses to create new experiences for its customers: Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Amazon SageMaker for machine learning.

Discover the many different ways AWS innovates to support the hospitality industry.