2016 was the first year Americans spent more at eating and drinking establishments than food in the home.

That’s great news for restaurants and QSR brands like SONIC.

But the stomach wars are heating up! Food ordering platforms, new ways to order and a crop of fast-casual competition are all changing the food landscape quickly.

SONIC is a drive-in, fast-food restaurant chain with 3,500+ locations in over 45 American states. For more than 60 years, SONIC has delivered unique guest experiences centered around a menu of made-to-order American classics and fun, speedy and personalized service from SONIC’s signature Carhops.

While SONIC’s guest experience is tied to American nostalgia, they’re always looking for new ways to modernize. Just as customers are changing, technology has opened up new possibilities in how customers can order, pay and connect with SONIC.

Wrapping technology into the SONIC experience is a critical part of the organization’s strategic vision. They developed an Integrated Customer Engagement (ICE) initiative to increase interaction and personalization with technology throughout their customer experience.

A platform designed for flexibility and growth

However, there was a challenge. SONIC’s existing digital infrastructure could not support this strategic vision. They needed to create a rebuild of their foundation to move faster and adapt quickly.

SONIC chose ThoughtWorks to design and implement an enterprise digital platform strategy on AWS, that allows them to experiment, add innovative new services quickly and evolve as fast as their customers. We brought a team, methodology, experience, and technical know-how to quickly ramp up the initiative, helping the SONIC team establish new cultural norms while architecting the solution. 

The new platform adopts an API first strategy to expose existing business capabilities to different stakeholders, allowing them to be nimble by pulling in the best of breed applications, APIs, databases and messaging to power a better customer experience. For example, marketing can use it to create better dashboards and personalized offers and the payments team can build on top to develop innovative solutions like ordering ahead with Amazon Alexa and Sonic’s new mobile app.

Moving from a monolithic architecture, which wasn’t easy to scale or change, to a flexible, cloud-based architecture has allowed SONIC to plug in new services and technologies quickly. For SONIC, this was their first production application to be fully cloud-native. SONIC engaged ThoughtWorks to take this idea from concept to deployment because they needed a partner with experience in designing flexible APIs and automating AWS cloud-native infrastructure to support frequent deployments. 

They now have a digital menu management tool which allows SONIC to offer extensive order customization, including more than 1.3 million drink combinations. A continuous delivery approach, paired with tools to improve operational efficiency, allowed Sonic to reduce the time to release new features to customers to days and weeks, instead of months and years.

Now, SONIC can enhance the drive-in experience using new technology that allows them to communicate to guests about what they care about most, when and where they want to hear it. SONIC guests can now experience a classic drive-in experience, modernized to meet the standards they expect.