Why QSR brands are funding 2027 drive-thru and POS tech

Jeff Wayman came back from FSTEC, the foodservice technology conference, with a number he could not vouch for and could not shake. Someone at the show told him roughly one third of all restaurants are not profitable. Wayman, speaking for Telaid, repeated it in a MarketScale Studio segment with a warning attached: nobody had verified it.

He passed it on anyway because of what the brands he talks to are doing with the months left in the year. With 2026 almost over, he says, they are sitting back and planning for 2027, ranking capital expenditure (CapEx, the money spent on equipment and systems that last for years rather than on day-to-day operating costs) and deciding what changes to make to the tech stack, the set of ordering, payment, network and kitchen systems a restaurant runs. Every brand he spoke with has technology in its plan.

Trade press placed the same mood at the conference. Restaurant Business, covering FSTEC in Dallas in late September 2026, described a weak restaurant business, an AI backlash and a swing back toward human-centric hospitality, and added that restaurants still want technology. The National Restaurant Association had set up the year the same way in a February 2026 press release, pointing to persistent cost increases, restrained consumer spending and operators investing in digital ordering, AI and automation to relieve margin pressure.

The unverified one-third figure is an undercount

The National Restaurant Association counted 42% of operators as unprofitable in 2025. That July 2026 analysis draws on government data and surveys of operators, and it points the same direction as the show-floor statistic with a larger magnitude. Wayman did not name a source for the figure he heard, and he said on the recording that it had not been verified.

The association's arithmetic shows why the share is that large. Before the pandemic, a typical restaurant spent about 33 cents of each sales dollar on food, another 33 cents on labor and roughly 29 cents on utilities, occupancy, supplies, administration, repairs and card processing, leaving a pre-tax margin near 5%. The association estimates that total expenses for an average restaurant rose 36% between 2019 and 2026.

On the association's model restaurant, that increase turns a $75,000 pre-tax profit into a $432,600 loss if sales stay at 2019 levels. Sales would have to climb 29% just to break even and 36% to restore the old 5% margin, by the association's figures. Average menu prices rose 36% between February 2020 and May 2026, the association notes from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which is roughly the increase that recovery requires, with traffic dampened across much of the industry.

For an operator, that is the reason the budget conversation has moved toward tools. Menu pricing has already done the work the association's math asks of it, and a large share of operators still ended 2025 in the red. The next margin has to come from how the store runs.

Restaurant wages are up 41% since 2019, ahead of food at 35%

The association's July 2026 analysis puts numbers on the three. Average hourly earnings of restaurant employees jumped 41% from pre-pandemic levels, while average wholesale food prices rose 35%, and utilities, occupancy, supplies and card swipe fees each registered double-digit increases since 2019. The association reports no single figure for energy on its own, so the ranking between food and energy stays open while labor sits at the top of the list.

Food has a forecast of its own. The USDA Economic Research Service's Food Price Outlook, updated September 25, 2026, reported food-away-from-home prices 3.4% higher in August 2026 than a year earlier and forecast a 3.5% increase for all of 2026. For 2027, ERS forecasts food-away-from-home prices rising 2.6%, inside a forecast interval of 0.2% to 5.1%.

That index measures what diners pay at restaurants, so it tracks the pricing side of Wayman's food pressure rather than the wholesale invoice. ERS builds the forecast by comparing calendar-year average prices with the prior year and fitting statistical models to recent trends, which is why it publishes an interval as well as a midpoint. The width of the 2027 band tells an operator how little certainty sits behind any single food number in a 2027 budget.

The practical reading for a QSR finance lead is that labor is the line technology is being asked to defend first. Elo Touch Solutions and Coresight Research, in a September 2026 report, describe entry-level labor for crew, prep and cashier roles as harder to find and keep, with less interest from younger workers and high turnover compounding the problem.

Comp sales, guest counts and check size set the 2027 priorities

Wayman spent part of his career on the brand side, and he says the public brands narrow their scorecard to three metrics. Comp sales, short for comparable sales, measure revenue at restaurants open long enough to be measured against the same stores a year earlier, so new openings do not flatter the number. Guest counts track traffic, average check size tracks what each guest spends, and Wayman calls the trio the three big bigs because they are what Wall Street looks at.

Those metrics bound the struggling-industry story for the largest chains. Restaurant Brands International announced in a February 12, 2026 press release that consolidated comparable sales rose 3.1% in the fourth quarter of 2025, with 2.6% at Burger King in the United States, 2.8% at Tim Hortons in Canada and 6.1% in international markets. System-wide sales grew 5.8% in the quarter and 5.3% for the year, the company said in the same release.

Wayman's read allows for that split. Most QSRs are feeling the pain, he says, and that does not mean all of them are; he points to coffee shops with a drive-thru focus and to smaller specialty QSRs that appear to be doing well in a hard environment, and he declines to name them. The explanation he offers for the gap is the drive-thru itself.

The 2027 planning he describes goes wider than technology. Brands will look at menu innovation and study what competitors A, B and C are doing, and he expects some to keep discounting heavily to drive traffic while others go back to core products and dial up a quality message, a potpourri of strategy in his words. Technology sits in every version of it, whether POS (point of sale, the register and ordering system), kiosks, AI or drive-thru equipment.

Qu's 2026 State of Digital & Beyond Report, published in May 2026 from a survey of 168 QSR and fast-casual brands across more than 94,000 locations, found 48% of brands plan to increase technology investment in 2026, including 54% of QSRs. The quieter signal in the same report is that 41% of brands are putting money into POS modernization, reinforcing the system closest to the transaction.

The drive-thru lane gets the capital first

That revenue share is Wayman's estimate, and it sets the order he expects capital to follow. Qu's May 2026 report found QSRs invest more heavily than fast-casual brands in front-of-house AI such as voice ordering and drive-thru computer vision. Elo and Coresight's September 2026 survey of 147 U.S. QSR executives found 46% of restaurant leaders report faster drive-thru throughput from customer-facing technology and 53% report higher customer satisfaction.

A sale of the brand does not replace the equipment in the stores, Wayman says. What is in the restaurant likely stays there for a number of years, and a new management team arriving after an acquisition evaluates the existing tech stack and determines what changes, if any, need to be made. The lane a brand buys is usually the lane it inherits.

Elo and Coresight found the same inheritance at scale. In their survey, 84% of operators said their stack was built incrementally, adding solutions as demand surfaced, and 67% now say they prioritize platform-native, connected technology over isolated best-of-breed tools. Ninety-five percent are actively scaling customer-facing and operational technology such as digital menu boards, self-order kiosks, POS platforms, mobile ordering apps and kitchen display systems, and only 8% describe themselves as still early in scaling.

For a deployment lead, the 2027 question is whether the lane's cameras, order points and kitchen screens can share data once installed, more than which device to buy. Wayman's unnamed coffee chains are the test case he offers: a drive-thru focus, run well, in a market where, by his account, most peers are struggling.

AI was front of mind at FSTEC and at scale almost nowhere

Everybody at the show was talking about AI, Wayman says, and everybody had a different take on what it can do for their organization. He lists three places it already runs in QSRs: remote AI taking orders in the drive-thru, a vision AI component hooked into camera management, and more technology linked to kitchen equipment at the back of the house. Vision AI means software that interprets what a camera sees, counting cars in a lane or watching a prep station, rather than only recording it.

Nation's Restaurant News reported in August 2025, ahead of FSTEC 2025 in Kissimmee, Florida, that SoundHound had launched Vision AI, a feature that combines voice recognition with visual understanding so one system can hear a drive-thru order and interpret real-world visual cues at the same time, alongside a new voice AI partnership for drive-thru lanes. The same preview noted that the conference agenda asked operators directly how AI delivers return on investment.

Measured adoption is still thin. Elo and Coresight's September 2026 survey found only 18% of QSR executives consider drive-thru AI or voice ordering a core, at-scale capability, and just over 25% say the same of AI-driven recommendations and promotions. Qu's May 2026 benchmark found 73% of brands investing in AI now or within the year, while 9% report meaningful impact, 33% describe the value as emerging and 43% report limited value to date.

Qu's respondents named the reason themselves. Fifty-five percent cite operational execution as the top barrier to a better guest experience and 37% cite fragmented systems and data, and the report places most of the industry in proof-of-concept territory, spending real money without yet scaling outcomes. Wayman did not attach a return figure to any of the deployments he described.

His position is that brands will adopt at different rates and different scales, with different twists on the solution, and that one size will not fit all. The Restaurant Business account of an AI backlash at FSTEC in September 2026 reads as the same argument from the operator side: resistance to technology bought for its own sake, from buyers who still want what fits their store.

Budget jockeying runs to the end of 2026

Wayman's forecast for the next few months is a lot of planning, a lot of prioritizing and a lot of jockeying for budget as brands head into 2027. The National Restaurant Association's February 2026 press release framed the whole year the same way, with chief economist Chad Moutray saying success would hinge on operators getting the math right after a year in which 60% reported softer customer traffic.

The association forecast real sales growth of 1.3% for 2026 and said operators would concentrate investment on digital ordering and payments, loyalty programs, automation and targeted marketing. Qu's report sets the marker for whether the AI line in a 2027 budget pays off: the brands that move from emerging to meaningful impact, it says, will be the ones with the cleanest underlying data and the clearest definition of success.