Cape Girardeau Chick-fil-A opens new mobile drive-thru line

A new drive-thru has been added to the Chick-fil-A at 3333 Gordonville Road in Cape Girardeau that will exclusively handle orders made through the restaurant’s app.

Mobile Thru, as the College Park, Georgia-based company terms it, allows customers to order their meals on a mobile app, scan a QR code to check in at the drive thru, and pick up their meals that have already been prepared. Individual restaurants can opt in to Mobile Thru and many new Chick-fil-A locations are opening with it.

“It’s just something that were trying to utilize as another tool in our tool belt to make sure that we speed it up. Chick-fil-A is pretty proud of it corporately, saying it tremendously helps, so we wanted to go ahead and give it a shot,” Cody House, the Cape Girardeau location’s director of operations, said.

The Cape Girardeau Chick-fil-A’s Mobile Thru lane opened Monday, July 8. House said the overall goal of the Mobile Thru service is to make the drive-thru process faster for guests. A remodel completed in 2023 added around 100 parking spaces and increased the capacity of the location’s drive-thru from 18 vehicles to 64 vehicles.

“We’re trying to just utilize our drive-thru to the best of its ability. Seeing that a lot of people like the on-the-go mobile (option), we’re trying to utilize that lane to help make sure we speed up the service to the guests that do mobile as well as the guests that place it here at the store,” he said.

The drive-thru still features two lanes that merge into one another, but the outer lane is now reserved exclusively for mobile orders, with menus replaced with QR stations to scan and check in.

“From that same merge, everything is the same. You’ll still pull up to the window and we’ll have your food. The only thing that’s changing with this Mobile Thru is there will be no order takes outside for you to take your orders at,” House said.

House said he could see other businesses lean more heavily into app-based services in the future.

“I think we’re moving to an age of technology, so with that I think it could definitely be something all stores have the possibility of doing,” he said. “It just depends on what they want to do.”

The Cape Girardeau Chick-fil-A opened in 2011.

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