Remember when fast-food chains wanted you to come in to order at the counter or to place your order through a hard-to-understand drive-through speaker? Sure, having people take your order sometimes (often) led to mistakes, but what's extra pickles when you said: "hold the pickles" between friends?
It turns out that these things actually matter quite a bit and that has led to a drive to bring fast-food ordering into the modern world. That has led to a bit of an arms race between the major players in the fast-food space.
When it comes to the fast food wars, the next frontier is getting customers online — everyone from McDonald's (MCD) to Sweetgreen (SG) to Yum! Brands (YUM)-owned Taco Bell have been trying to woo customers to their apps with a series of promotions, subscriptions, and online-only offers.
The early iteration of this — a loyalty program where customers can collect points and use them to get free food and other perks — is now a given and available at more or less every major chain. To step up the game and continue to outdo competitors, Taco Bell recently launched a monthly taco-a-day-for-$10 subscription while the salad chain Sweetgreen also has a monthly offer of $3 off daily purchases of $9.99 or more for $10 a month.
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Which Fast Food Apps Have The Most Users?
While McDonald's (MCD) has largely lagged behind competitors when it comes to online offers and innovative promotions, the iconic burger chain is still the most-downloaded fast food app in the U.S.
According to research from Apptopia first reported by QSR Magazine, the Golden Arches saw 2.2 million people download its app in February. Starbucks (SBUX), Domino's (DPZ), and Taco Bell were behind at a respective 910,000, 784,00 and 683,000 downloads.
Another Yum!Brands brand, Kentucky Fried Chicken dropped from fifth to nine place with 477,000 downloads in the last month. Dunkin' (DNKN) rose from ninth to sixth with 598,000 downloads while private chicken chain Chick-fil-A takes fifth place with 687,000.
After seeing its downloads spike after launching the taco subscription in January, Taco Bell had a corrective steep in downloads that fell 16.7% from January to February.
Starbucks, it should be noted, likely has lower download numbers than McDonald's because it already has a very large digital user base.
What Does This Mean for the Fast-Food Wars?
As the Taco Bell numbers clearly show, subscriptions and various offers are an extremely effective way to drive app downloads — even after the corrective drop, Taco Bell is still receiving 100,000 more daily active app users than it did prior to the subscription's launch.
As the fast-food wars intensify, both investors and customers can expect to see more of these kinds of offers and subscriptions because companies that do can gain an edge over competitors. Domino's, which took second place after McDonald's for app downloads, is currently doing just that with a $3 "tip discount" for those who order pizzas online but pick them up in person.
"Now that we have the subscription model and it seems to be working, the world is kind of our oyster now," Taco Bell's Chief Digital Officer Zipporah Allen told TheStreet in an exclusive interview last month. "It's like: what are the other applications of a subscription service?"
