Chick-fil-A Corporate Support Center

This week, Chick-fil-A officially opened its first elevated drive-thru restaurant in the chain. Located south of metro Atlanta, Chick-fil-A Jodeco Road began serving Guests on Thursday, August 22. A first-of-its-kind restaurant for Chick-fil-A, the drive-thru only restaurant features four drive-thru lanes and an elevated kitchen with a unique meal transport system.    “Our Guests lead busy lives, and we’re focused on designing our restaurants to best serve their needs,” said Jonathan Reed, Executive Director of Design for Chick-fil-A, Inc. “With the new Elevated Drive-Thru design, featuring our first four lane drive-thru, we're aiming to deliver quality food and genuine hospitality in a way that’s uniquely Chick-fil-A, and gives our Guests time back in their day.”     Read more: https://lnkd.in/eUnbYctG.

“It’s so ironic that I am building my career at Chick-fil-A, Inc. because I’m from a chicken town.     My hometown is Versailles, Ohio, with a mere 3,000 people, and every June they host a big community festival celebrating the area’s history in the industry of poultry production. This annual chicken festival is no small thing, though. They shut down a highway for a band procession and sell over 35,000 chicken dinners within three days!     So it’s only fitting that I now work at Chick-fil-A’s Corporate Support Center.     But this company is so much more than chicken – there is a huge culture of care, and a tremendous amount of career growth opportunity.     After college and my early career, I moved from Ohio to Atlanta and started in the Restaurant Development department as a Property Manager for the Southwest region. I have since been promoted to Senior Property Manager, helping Chick-fil-A Owner-Operators in the Southeast region.     In my role, I have the privilege of supporting Owner-Operators which means I support them from Atlanta or in the field. Our team focuses on helping to navigate the day-to-day realities of the restaurant property site – including the lease, on-site traffic or safety issues.       For example, we partner with the State when a Chick-fil-A restaurant may be impacted by a highway widening project. We partner with our landlords when they have a development project. We help strategize on traffic navigation and more.     The Restaurant Development Team prioritizes building and nurturing relationships.  A significant part of my role involves maintaining strong connections with restaurant Owner-Operators so they know who to reach out to when property issues arise. We collaborate to establish robust relationships with property landlords, neighboring tenants, and municipalities, enabling us to proactively and reactively address any property conflicts.    Most of all, my job is to show care. And it’s so easy to do because I’m pouring from a cup that is overflowing. Chick-fil-A has taken such incredible care of me, that I can’t help but reflect that same care onto others around me.    I feel eager to show the same level of unmatched care that I have felt from my team in Restaurant Development.    I am proud to come from a small chicken town, and now working at the Chick-fil-A Corporate Support Center, I’m even more proud to grow my career at a company that shows such significant care.”    - Katherine Subler, Senior Property Manager, Southeast Region    #LifeAtChickfilAInc #RestaurantDevelopment 

After accepting her job offer with Chick-fil-A Inc., Stephanie (Conyack) Smith and her fiancé went out for a celebratory dinner. What Stephanie didn't know was that she would experience Chick-fil-A's culture of care that evening, weeks before stepping onto the Support Center campus for her first day.    Check out the story of Chick-fil-A staff Stephanie Smith and Tres Moore, JD-MBA , and their touching encounter that evening.

"The people we get to work with at Chick-fil-A, Inc. are just incredibly good people.     When I go to work, I genuinely enjoy the people that I'm around – both in the Financial Services department and across the organization.     Because of the consistent employee retention at Chick-fil-A, the staff here can enjoy deep, meaningful relationships that make everyone feel seen and known at work. One of the top reasons that working as an accountant at Chick-fil-A is so great is that there’s a way to be known on a personal level.    Of course we work hard, but the culture here emphasizes balance and relationship building. For example, I like the flexibility of our hybrid work model, and when I do come into the office for team meetings, we prioritize personal connection before every meeting begins.     It’s really cool to realize that these are the people I’m probably going to be spending the rest of my career with. I love that we can do great work together while also doing life together too.     That connection and community attributes a lot to how great Chick-fil-A is."   - Emily Garmon, Restaurant Accounting, Financial Services 

“When people think about restaurant operations and quick service restaurants, they think it's very simple. But the level of volume and efficiency that’s expected of a Chick-fil-A restaurant is just off the charts. So, we have to engage the latest and greatest technologies to not only keep up but to outpace customer expectations.     There's a lot of really cool stuff Chick-fil-A, Inc. is doing with computer vision to understand the inner workings of Chick-fil-A restaurants and to make a more efficient drive thru. Eventually the application I work on will integrate with machine learning, with AI, with chat bots. This level of innovation will work its way into numerous aspects of the restaurants and in much of Chick-fil-A Inc.’s technology, because of the volume of customers that Chick-fil-A restaurants support and because of the company’s ongoing growth.”    — Chandler Condra, Operator Technology Solutions, Digital Transformation & Technology     #Tech #ComputerVision #LifeatChickfilAInc

“As I relocated from Ohio to Georgia for my job at Chick-fil-A’s Corporate Support Center, I had reservations with leaving my strong community of friends and family.    I had taken a risk leaving my personal network, and during a risky time, too, as it was March of 2020 when I moved to Atlanta and started my job in Restaurant Development – right when the world was shutting down because of COVID.    But amidst the uncertainty that COVID brought with it, there was one thing that was NOT uncertain – the genuine and immediate support and care shown to me throughout Chick-fil-A, Inc.     COVID helped me to understand the magnitude of Chick-fil-A’s culture of care very quickly.     Atlanta was an unfamiliar city to me then, but my team and leaders became my community. They jumped right in to support me by sharing neighborhood and restaurants recommendations. They extended kindness in unexpected ways like sending care packages with encouraging words.     New friendships were forged and I quickly found myself settling right into the work and my new community, with all previous reservations off to the wayside.   My team went above and beyond what I ever could have imagined, and I felt so welcomed.    I soon found myself adopting Chick-fil-A's culture of care and sharing it back to my coworkers and with the Chick-fil-A Owner-Operators I support in my role.    As a Property Management team, we huddled around restaurant Owner-Operators to support their property management needs as they adapted their business during that time. We worked to serve as the buffer for Operators regarding all kinds of day-to-day real estate needs, including traffic concerns as drive-thru and delivery ramped up.     I could see and feel the Chick-fil-A culture of care hard at work. Our business is so relationship based, and people really are treated as the priority.     One of my favorite quotes from our founder, S. Truett Cathy, is ‘How do you know if someone needs encouragement? If they are breathing.'    Simply show care to everyone you come into contact with. In my humble opinion, that’s a company worth moving across the country for!”     - Katherine Subler, Senior Property Manager, Southeast Region    #RestaurantDevelopment  #LifeAtChickfilAInc 

This Summer, the Cows made an entertaining comeback with Code Moo! “Bringing the Chick-fil-A Cows to brighten up the summer is a fun – and rewarding – way to thank our Guests!” said Dustin Britt, senior director of brand strategy, investment, and entertainment. Special thanks to the many teams and partners involved in bringing the interactive mobile game to life. Guests can still play Code Moo in the Chick-fil-A App until Saturday, August 17th. Let us know what you think!

“I was blown away that a company so rooted in values and tradition was also so technologically advanced in analytics, machine learning and AI.     Working as a Chick-fil-A, Inc. data scientist, I’m surrounded by brilliant minds all the time. And I have the opportunity for professional development in ways that I didn't before. We’re encouraged to innovate and to be thought leaders. Nobody comes to me and tells me exactly how to do something. Instead, it’s a collaborative process.    Our data and technology staffers have a really supportive partnership. We are all committed to collaborating to build solutions that are even better than the sum of our parts.”    — Amanda Hand, Analytics Services Team, Enterprise Data & Analytics     #LifeatChickfilAInc #DataScience #DataInnovation 

“Care. I think that word gets thrown around a lot. It’s probably overused.    But here, it’s true. People here really do care. They’re genuine. They’re authentic. They tend to be so open with sharing their story, and that means we really get to know each other as people, not just as co-workers.    We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We work hard. We play hard. We know and laugh at ourselves.”    — Amanda Hand, Analytics Services Team, Enterprise Data & Analytics      #LifeatChickfilAInc #DataScience #WorkFullofCare 

“I always tell people, if you really want to get a feel for data and tech at Chick-fil-A, Inc., drive on over to one of our restaurants, park in the parking lot, and walk all the way around the building.  Just observe: Where do you see opportunities? How would you guess the team members are able to keep things moving so effectively and efficiently? Notice the use of tablets to speed up ordering. Notice all the things working to keep everyone moving through smoothly and quickly. Imagine all that’s happening in the kitchen to support that efficiency and our signature hospitality. We’ve got everything from robotic vision to machine learning powering our operations behind the scenes.  We have incredible restaurant team members and franchisee Operators delivering a truly remarkable level of care and hospitality. They’re being supported by tools and technology and insights that are being delivered to them to help them be faster, smarter, and more informed. All of us working in data science and analytics here at Chick-fil-A, Inc. are supporting those outcomes. We’re using advanced modeling to support decisions around demand management, capacity, and a myriad of areas. When we unlock the potential in our data, we can deliver the insights and the information necessary to ensure our customers have what they need when they need it.” — Korri Jones, MBA, Advanced Analytics Portfolios Team #LifeatChickfilAInc #DataScience #Data