Inside Chick-fil-A’s Production Design Labs: Dozens of Engineers Breaking New Ground

People often ask Scott Herdic, “Why does a chicken company need industrial and mechanical engineers, anyway?”?

Those questioners would likely be surprised if they stepped into Chick-fil-A, Inc.’s Production Design department — an airy space populated by dozens of engineers boasting advanced degrees and backgrounds in areas such as thermodynamics, material science and nuclear engineering. ?

From the “ice cream lab” to the environmental test chamber, the workspace is covered with write-on walls where Herdic’s colleagues hash out a wide variety of innovations essential to building the company’s future. One R&D team is working on ways to maintain freshness amid tomorrow’s robotic innovations while another team is engineering new fryers equipped to power the capacity growth needed by the booming company’s more than 2,700 restaurants.?

“This is a world class space that we have, with amazingly skilled people,” says Herdic, director of the department’s R&D Team. “We have a lot of space; we have a lot of capabilities, and we've been well resourced over the years to get the equipment that we need. It’s a collaborative work environment where people are always bouncing ideas off each other.”?

Aside from the lab equipment to measure temperature, pressure, humidity, and other conditions, the engineers also have the software needed to create simulations and models to test plans digitally before building them.?

The entire Production Design Department is built around the company’s signature innovation process. Each project is assigned to a triad of engineers: one responsible for the Understand and Imagine stages, one for Prototype, and one for Validate and Launch. ?

Of course, sometimes the engineers focusing on Understand and Imagine arrive at an idea that is so new they’re not even sure if it’s possible. Those challenges get handed over to the R&D team, where Herdic and his colleagues determine if there’s a solution that’s both feasible and worth pursuing. The projects that pass muster get submitted as a business plan to company leadership for approval, eventually landing back with a new triad for further development.?

With its busy restaurants relying on Chick-fil-A’s Corporate Support Center to find ways to meet growing customer demand, the company has invested heavily in engineering, Herdic says.?

“The organization recognizes how helpful the engineering mindset is to addressing capacity challenges,” he says. In fact, by the end of 2022, the Production Design department will have grown 50% in the space of two years.?

The team frequently attracts top engineers with a wide diversity of backgrounds and experiences — in part because of Chick-fil-A’s renowned Culture of Care, just as strong in its corporate teams as it is in its restaurants, as well as its generous benefits, emphasis on employee wellness, and reasonable hours.?

Herdic says the Production Design Leadership Team is always watching to make sure the teams have a healthy balance. As a rule, workloads should be light enough that everyone is done for the day in time for dinner, he says. If one team’s needs start to escalate, there are floating specialists that can help.?

“Chick-fil-A has a strong culture of care,” he says. “It extends to the care we show for the engineers in Production Design, and also to the care we provide to Restaurant Team Members through the solutions we engineer.”??

Interested in joining Chick-fil-A's Production Design team? Visit us here to learn about our open positions.?