Fridays and Go

Vision have worked with TGIs before on numerous projects with the TGIs, Fridays and 63rd + 1st brand. Therefore, we were delighted to work with them once more on the world’s first Fridays takeaway concept – Fridays and Go.

The brief was to take the Fridays concept and turn it into a quick service restaurant. The QSR would serve customer favourites from the Fridays menu for guests to either eat in or takeaway. The key element of the kitchen operation was speed of service, as the outlet would also cater for click and collect delivery drivers, so a very high number of covers per service was expected. The client took over an existing site which had been trading for 12 months. We had to develop the concept reusing a lot of existing equipment to keep costs down with it being a trial site.

We designed a brand-new concept which the client wanted the potential to roll out to 30 sites over the next 2 years. The design was done on the basis that it was a quick service restaurant, was scalable and could be done at speed.

Careful consideration was needed for the integration of IT for the online delivery platforms and how this integrated into the hot lockers for delivery drivers to collect from. The specific hot lockers used were the first ones into the UK market. As the kitchen would be servicing both front of house and the hot lockers for delivery, careful consideration was required when planning the positioning of these elements to keep the correct flow and to ensure that they were in the optimum positions for speed of service.

Existing equipment was incorporated with new equipment, with special consideration paid around the type of equipment, particularly for the service line, to ensure that the equipment was suitable for the hold times and speed of service. The service line was also to include a brand-new coca cola frozen drinks concept.

We also had to integrate the client’s standard operating method into the whole concept. This included number of deliveries per week, split between frozen and fresh, defrosting regime, prep regime, and normal cooking methods. All of this was incorporated into a QSR concept.

Our designs included 3D visualisations as well as a 3D video walk through, which played a hugely important role in the design process as it allowed the operator to understand exactly how the site would look and operate, so they were confident it would meet their exact needs.

The installation took place over just 5 days. This included reengineering the extract system to work with the concept. As the scheme was incorporating some existing equipment, this was all serviced and cleaned to ensure it was fit for purpose and was integrated into the new scheme alongside new equipment.

One challenge faced was the lead time for delivery of the new hot lockers. As we knew they had a longer lead time, and with time being restricted for the project, we had to order the lockers right at the very start of the project. This was before the design had been finalised, as we knew that they would be part of the concept and we needed to ensure that they would definitely arrive in time, as they are a key component within the concept.