Amy's Gets a Drive Thru

From canned soups to organic pizzas and frozen dinners, Amy's is one  innovative frozen food company that made eating at home healthy with their wide variety of easy-to-prepare organic, GMO free options. And for everyone who's a fan of the healthy brand, the opening of their first retail location in San Francisco has been welcome news. In a more in-depth interview following one of our recent FNT stories that drew a lot of interest, we spoke with Paul Schiefer, Director of Restaurant Operations, about this innovative companies' decision to open a drive through.

 

“We'd been hearing from consumers for a very long time asking for something like this and we did something different with frozen food…making a delicious healthier version and people thought, 'hey can you do this for fast food?

 

We originally heard that about 8 years ago, and we thought 'that's interesting, but we're really not in that line of business, but I guess as we thought more about it and our own personal experiences….we thought hey we could probably do a better version of this.

 

One thing for us that was challenging is that we really wanted to make fresh cooked, high quality food, but to do that in a drive thru concept, so be able to make and do that with a lot of delicious menu variations but to do that very quickly was definitely the most challenging. 

 

It's a completely different menu, we developed it specifically for the drive thru. All of the food is made by Amy's kitchen, we get fresh produce from local suppliers, local growers, everything is organic. We do make some parts of the items in our frozen food facility but we do all the final prep in the facility itself. 

 

We're using ingredients that were grown in a sustainable way in the drive thru, the shape cover we've used solar panels, that provide enough electricity to cover what we need to use the packaging is all recycled paper board, we've used non GMO inks, we;ve really tried to practice what we preach. 

 

I think we're doing something new for the country which is exciting.