Taco Bell has been beta testing a mobile application that lets customers order their food so it can be ready for them to pick up at the restaurant.
Piloting the app at five locations in Orange County, Calif., Taco Bell plans to make the feature available for more customers in the next few weeks and possibly to all locations by the end of the year, Digital Trends reported via the Los Angeles Times.
Guests will be able to take their time on the menu and pay in advance through the app, which also works with their location. Using GPS, the app will alert Taco Bell employees to begin preparing the order when customers are a few minutes away, so the food will be hot and ready when they get there.
When they arrive, customers can go inside or pick up the food at the drive-thru window.
"With the popularity of millennials and smart phones, we saw this [mobile ordering] coming, and decided to build the ground work a couple of years ago for mobile," Jeff Jenkins, mobile lead for Taco Bell, told the L.A. Times. "Mobile is going to be the biggest sort of innovator, shake-up in the quick service industry since the drive-thru."
Customers can select their menu items and then the location to pick up, and past orders are saved to make future late-night taco runs even easier.
The taco chain started developing the app about two and a half years ago, according to Nation's Restaurant News.
While restaurants have been looking to implement mobile ordering for a while, officials wanted to ensure that consumers would be ready to use the feature if they spent money creating it.
"This year, it appears that they believe consumers are ready, as the use of mobile ordering has jumped to the fast track at a number of national chains," Nation's Restaurant News noted.
Ford Motor Company and Domino's Pizza recently partnered for a mobile app that lets customers order pizza for pick-up or delivery through their vehicle's connectivity system.
See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?
