NEC Display Solutions Customer Installation Food & Beverage
McDonald’s Deutschland LLC
Top quality burgers, top quality displays
Individual, innovative, interactive – these are the cornerstones of McDonald’s Deutschland new restaurant concept. Under the motto “The restaurant of the future”, the world’s best known restaurant chain is implementing a concept in Germany which is breaking new ground in many areas.
In the future, there will be more service, more digital interaction and more space to accommodate the individual wishes and needs of guests across the company’s circa 1500 restaurants. Large format displays from NEC Display Solutions play an important role here.
The renovated restaurants have a modern look. Guests will be served at their seats regardless of whether they order via an app, use one of the digital ordering terminals or order in the traditional way at the counter, all made possible through the intelligent use of technology.
The innovation continues with regard to menu selection. Guests can tailor their order, choosing to remove or add ingredients, ensuring they receive their favourite item just as they want it, freshly prepared and delivered to their table.
The NEC Solution
To make it easy for guests to obtain information about offers, McDonald’s Deutschland uses large format LCD displays from NEC Display Solutions. With a 46 inch diagonal measurement, the displays replace paper sheets which were previously standard and had to be changed several times a day to show the current menu. Five displays are installed next to one another in either a landscape or portrait format. Only a few, generally smaller restaurants, deviate from this configuration. A sixth screen, 40 inch in size, positioned to the side, displays the statutory price list and information about allergens.
“The displays play an important role for our new restaurant concept. We want to use them to optimally present our wide-ranging menu”, explains Marcel Kolb, Restaurant Innovation Manager at McDonald‘s Deutschland.
The monitors are connected to form a continuous canvas displaying the menu with occasional dynamic content such as animations and small product videos to bring more interest to the display. As the screens only have a negligible margin, they appear as a single homogeneous display area.
Central content and individual offersDisplays in restaurants across Germany are programmed centrally by a single service provider. The content is adapted to the time of day – from breakfast to the lunch menu to special afternoon and evening offers. Meanwhile, every restaurant also has the opportunity to present tailored local offers.
NEC’s modular slot-in PCs embedded within the displays feature Celeron processors from the latest Intel Skylake series with sufficient processing power to drive sophisticated animations and videos.“Our guests, our franchisees and our employees are very happy with the performance of the hardware”, says Kolb. “The client used by our CMS partner allows content to be presented flexibly in HD resolution”,
Quality and reliabilityQuality was one of the key reasons why McDonald’s Deutschland chose NEC displays. “Many of our restaurants are open far into the night or even around the clock all year round”, says Kolb. “The displays must be correspondingly reliable” McDonald’s has used displays from NEC for individual restaurants and projects for many years. “NEC was in the lead with regard to its price, quality and reliability, which is why we have chosen to partner with them again this time”, reports Kolb.
Renovations in record timeIn order to continue to present a consistent image in all restaurants over the coming years, NEC has undertaken to supply visually identical devices beyond the five-year warranty period. Replacement devices will be kept ready until 2024.
This year, McDonald‘s Deutschland is driving forward the renovation of its restaurants at top speed. In general, a few days must be sufficient to completely redesign the interior of a location, from the furniture to the kitchen facilities. Restaurants where more comprehensive renovations are due are allocated slightly longer.
More than 1000 restaurants have currently been renovated nationally. By the end of 2019, almost all the restaurants in Germany will have been converted.
The Result
Markus Kolb is very happy with the new appearance of the restaurants. “We are offering our guests a completely new restaurant experience with even more quality at all levels”, explains Kolb. “The sharp and brilliant presentation of our menu with accurate colours via the digital menu boards plays an important role here.”