Chick-fil-A against the burger three
Chick-fil-A is privately held. It files no 10-Q, holds no earnings call, publishes no quarterly comparable sales, no segment margin, no refranchising ratio and carries no sell-side consensus. Everything below is annual, sourced from its franchise disclosure document, Technomic estimates and the QSR 50 — and every cell is tagged by basis so it is never read as disclosure parity with Restaurant Brands International, McDonald's or Wendy's.
Disclosure basis — why the quarterly grid stays empty
The Flame Index runs on filed quarterly data. Chick-fil-A supplies none of it. This is the row-by-row translation.
Do not chart Chick-fil-A annual growth against a quarterly comp
Chick-fil-A's +5.2% is full-year U.S. system sales growth, which blends new-unit contribution into the number. Burger King's +8.5%, McDonald's +0.8% and Wendy's −7.0% are quarterly same-restaurant sales, which strip new units out by definition. The two figures answer different questions and a shared axis would flatter Chick-fil-A in a strong unit-growth year and punish it in a flat one. The only Chick-fil-A same-store figure in circulation for 2025 is roughly +1% from trade reporting, and it is an estimate.
What each row of the Flame Index can hold for Chick-fil-A
| Flame Index row | RBI / MCD / WEN | Chick-fil-A | Consequence for the panel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterly U.S. comps | Filed | None | No quarterly series. Annual system-sales growth only, labelled as such. |
| Systemwide sales | Filed | FDD + Technomic | Comparable at the full-year level, one-year lag versus a filed quarter. |
| Average unit volume | FDD / QSR 50 | FDD Item 19 | The strongest genuine comparison on the page. |
| Restaurant count | Filed | FDD | Comparable, but split operated versus licensed or the count inflates. |
| In-store vs drive-thru mix | Estimates only | Estimates only | Equally undisclosed. Chick-fil-A is the useful outlier case, not a data point. |
| Digital sales % | MCD discloses | Anecdotal | Operator-level claims of 50%+ in top markets. Not systemwide, not audited. |
| Franchisee four-wall margin | Partially | Not applicable | Licensed-operator economics. See the operator-model section. |
| Refranchising / estate mix | Filed | No equivalent | Corporate owns nearly all real estate. The concept does not translate. |
| Analyst consensus / ratings | Live | None | No listed equity, no debt rating on the operating chain. Row stays blank. |
| Remodel / image penetration | RBI discloses | None | Format changes visible only through permits and trade coverage. |
FDD = franchise disclosure document, filed annually with state regulators and dated to the prior calendar year. Blank cells here mean the metric does not exist in any Chick-fil-A source, not that it was omitted.
Scale and volume — where the comparison is real
FY2025, U.S. only, from the QSR 50 alongside the Chick-fil-A FDD. This is the one part of the Flame Index where all four brands sit on a defensible common basis.
FY2025 scorecard
| Brand | U.S. system sales | Avg sales / unit | Franchised or licensed | Company | Total units | Net unit change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| McDonald's | $55.06B | $4.09M | 13,062 | 644 | 13,706 | +147 |
| Chick-fil-A | $23.92B | $7.70M | 3,219 | 68 | 3,287 | +178 |
| Wendy's | $11.90B | $2.00M | 5,546 | 423 | 5,969 | +36 |
| Burger King | $11.07B | $1.66M | 5,517 | 1,132 | 6,649 | −52 |
QSR 50 2026, ranking FY2025 U.S. system-wide sales. Chick-fil-A's average sales per unit is a blended figure including mall and non-traditional locations; the stand-alone figure from its own FDD is $9.16M. Chick-fil-A totals are marked as QSR estimates in the source table.
Average unit volume
Chick-fil-A's stand-alone box does roughly 5.5 times a Burger King's annual sales, on six trading days a week.
Sales per operating day
Chick-fil-A closes Sundays, so roughly 312 trading days against 365 for the burger three. Normalising for that widens rather than narrows the gap.
Computed here AUV divided by trading days (Chick-fil-A 312, others 365). Not a company-reported metric and not adjusted for Christmas, Thanksgiving or daypart coverage — Chick-fil-A also serves no dinner-late or breakfast-heavy franchise equivalent.
System sales against estate size
Chick-fil-A produces more than twice Burger King's U.S. volume from roughly half the restaurants. Burger King's estate is the largest of the three burger names by unit count and the smallest by sales.
Growth cadence — the roles have swapped
Chick-fil-A is decelerating from a decade of double-digit growth while Burger King U.S. runs its strongest stretch since 2023. The two facts sit on different measurement bases and are shown separately for that reason.
U.S. system sales and growth rate
Two consecutive sub-6% years, the slowest pair in at least two decades for the chain.
Latest reported quarter — filed comps
Quarter ended late June 2026. Same-restaurant or comparable sales as stated by each company. Chick-fil-A has no entry, by construction.
| Brand | U.S. comp | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Burger King | +8.5% | RBI release |
| McDonald's | +0.8% | MCD release |
| Wendy's | −7.0% | WEN release |
| Chick-fil-A | not published | annual only |
McDonald's +0.8% came with falling U.S. guest counts. Wendy's −7.0% was its sixth consecutive quarterly decline, on traffic down 12.5%.
Where Chick-fil-A's growth is now coming from
- Units, not volume. 178 net new U.S. locations in 2025, the fastest unit add of the four brands here, while stand-alone AUV fell 1.7%.
- Malls outperformed stand-alones. Mall AUV rose 1.4% to just under $4.6M as stand-alone volumes slipped — the reverse of the last decade's pattern.
- The ceiling is visible at the top. The highest-volume restaurant cleared $20M in annual sales and the best mall unit did $14.4M, but the average box has stopped climbing.
- Traffic still positive. Foot-traffic tracking from September 2025 through February 2026 showed visits per location rising year over year, ahead of QSR rivals — Chick-fil-A is adding visits without discounting.
U.S. system-sales growth from 2023 to 2025. For most of the previous decade, including through the pandemic, growth ran in double digits. Chick-fil-A is now expanding at a rate a mature burger chain would recognise, from a base no burger chain can match per unit.
Drive-thru — the throughput case against the timer
This is the section where Chick-fil-A earns its place on the page. Your channel rows flag that no company discloses in-store versus drive-thru mix; Chick-fil-A is the evidence that the industry's standard drive-thru metric measures the wrong thing.
Total time versus time per car
25th annual Intouch Insight drive-thru study, 13 brands, roughly 165 mystery-shopper occasions per brand.
Why the slowest lane scores highest
- Longest total time of all 13 brands — over seven minutes from arrival to departure, the slowest fulfilment recorded in the study.
- Fastest once queue length is controlled for. Adjusted for cars in the lane, Chick-fil-A sat just above 2:30 per car, tied at the front with Dutch Bros.
- Highest satisfaction of the field at 98%, against a study average of 91%. Customers appear to price the queue as a signal of demand, not of failure.
- The metric, not the operation, is the problem. Brands averaging under one car in the lane look faster on total time and slower per car. A raw drive-thru timer rewards an empty lane, which is exactly what a turnaround brand does not want to be measured on.
- Format follows from this. Multi-lane drive-thrus, dedicated app-only lanes and outdoor order-takers with weather shelters are the physical response to throughput rather than speed.
Study average total time 5:35; Taco Bell fastest at 4:16, its fifth consecutive year at the front. Burger King and McDonald's brand-level times are in the study but not in the published summaries cited here, so they are left off the chart rather than approximated.
Operator model — the row that does not translate
Your four-wall profitability panel assumes a franchise. Chick-fil-A does not run one. Comparing operator take-home to a Burger King franchisee's cash-on-cash return is a category error, and this is the shape of it.
Chick-fil-A
- $10,000 franchise fee
- Corporate buys the land, builds the store, owns the equipment
- 15% of gross sales, base operating service fee
- Plus roughly 50% of pre-tax restaurant profit
Burger King
- $15,000–$50,000 franchise fee
- Franchisee funds the build: roughly $348K–$3.32M excluding real estate
- 4.5% royalty
- 4.5% brand fund
Wendy's
- $40,000–$50,000 fee, 20-year term
- Total investment roughly $2.0M–$3.7M
- 4% royalty on net sales
- 3.5% national advertising fund
Brand take on gross sales, before profit share
Royalty plus advertising or brand fund as a share of sales. Chick-fil-A's 15% is the base fee only; the additional 50% profit share sits on top of it and has no counterpart at the other three.
Rates from each brand's current franchise disclosure document as summarised by franchise-data services. Chick-fil-A's structure is a licensed-operator agreement rather than a franchise, so the label is a convenience, not an equivalence. McDonald's is omitted because its rent component makes a single percentage misleading.
What Chick-fil-A does not disclose
Items the Flame Index carries for the three public names that no Chick-fil-A filing, document or trade report publishes.
- Quarterly comparable or same-restaurant sales, on any basis
- Traffic or transaction counts, systemwide or by market
- Average check, and any price-versus-mix decomposition
- Revenue, operating income or margin for the parent company
- Systemwide digital sales percentage or loyalty membership
- In-store versus drive-thru versus delivery channel mix
- Marketing spend, in dollars or as a share of sales
- Remodel counts or a modern-image equivalent metric
- Operator-level profitability after the 50% profit share
- International performance, split out from the U.S. estate
The FDD is the only recurring disclosure, arrives annually, and is dated to the prior calendar year — so a Chick-fil-A cell on this page will always be one to two quarters staler than the filed cells beside it.