Unisex bathrooms. Fast lanes for online orders. Subway tiles. No more fried foods.
This is not your father’s barbecue joint.
With barbecue burning up the fast-casual segment, Dickey’s Barbecue Pit—the category leader with $426 million in sales in 2014 (up 29 percent from the previous year)—is not marinating in its success. This week, the 74-year-old chain, rolled out its fourth-generation store design, in Dallas. And the new store hits all the current fast-casual hot buttons as Dickey’s aims to stay in front of the competition.
“We took five years’ worth of notes on the things we wanted to update and improve upon,” says CEO Roland Dickey, who spent months testing a full-scale prototype inside a warehouse before its real-world debut. The result, he says, is a more efficient, focused and simplistic store—“a leaner, meaner profit machine for our owner-operators.”