8 hours Ago By [email protected] (Bobby Lewis)
Chick-fil-A is a signature fast-food restaurant in the American South and perhaps one of the most beloved chains in the country. With decades of retail success behind it and a presence in 48 of the 50 U.S.
states, Chick-fil-A is positioning itself for the future — and with that comes some big changes to the brand. In 2025, Chick-fil-A plans to expand to multiple continents, change a famous drink, and bring back some fan favorites that have been absent from menus for a combined total of over 10 years. Chick-fil-A already enjoys stronger same-store sales than almost any other fast food brand, making it America's third-largest chain restaurant by sales despite having relatively few locations.
Chick-fil-A will make changes in 2025 that promise to build on this success by engaging customers, revolutionizing kitchen efficiency, and turning this humble child of the South into a global fast-food juggernaut. Chick-fil-A is (re)launching overseas This year, following through on plans announced in 2023, Chick-fil-A is opening new stores in Europe and Asia. The company hopes that five new storefronts in the United Kingdom and one in Singapore, all locally owned and operated, will be enough to overcome Chick-fil-A's past struggles to expand overseas .
While Chick-fil-A was briefly available in London in 2019, the Singapore store will be its first-ever restaurant in Asia. Chick-fil-A was also available in South Africa for several years before it pulled out in 2001; currently, the company has no publicly known plans to return to Africa. Chick-fil-A's five U.
K. restaurants, scheduled to open in early 2025, will be the start of a 10-year, $100 million investment in that market. Similarly, its Singapore location, opening in late 2025, spearheads a 10-year, $75 million commitment to a firm foothold in the Asian fast-food chicken market.
Chick-fil-A is expanding in Canada Chick-fil-A may be taking a bit of a gamble on its European and Asian expansions, but its strategy for entering the Canadian market has been a major success since its first Canadian store opened in Toronto in 2019. And now, just one year after expanding into the Canadian province of Alberta, Chick-fil-A announced its first British Columbia locations will open by 2028. Located just north of Washington state in the U.
S., British Columbia is Canada's third most populous province, and it includes the major coastal city of Vancouver. "British Columbia has a number of vibrant, thriving communities across the province that makes it such a great place for us to grow," said Chick-fil-A's director of restaurant development in Canada, Jessica Sisk Roehle.
But before Chick-fil-A reaches the Canadian West Coast, it will spend this year building on its existing success with eight new stores across Ontario and Alberta. The new restaurants are an over 33% increase from its current 22 total Canadian stores. No more fresh-squeezed lemonade Chick-fil-A's lemonade stood out in the fast food industry for being freshly squeezed in-store.
But for a restaurant that thrives on efficiency, manually making the lemonade took up an inordinate amount of employee time – 10,000 hours a day across all restaurants — while also exposing workers to the risk of crushed fingers. That's why Chick-fil-A lemonade is no longer freshly squeezed in-store, but thankfully without sacrificing much freshness. Now, Chick-fil-A juices its lemons on an industrial scale, using dozens of robots in a centralized factory outside of Los Angeles.
Bags of lemon juice are then shipped to individual restaurants, where employees mix it with water and sugar to make the final product. Chick-fil-A lemonade may no longer be freshly squeezed in-store, but it is still made with just three ingredients — lemons, water, and sugar — and never from concentrate. Key limes are on the menu for a limited time The list of discontinued Chick-fil-A items is long, but fans are excited that several lime-themed favorites have at least temporarily avoided this fate.
After nearly six years, Chick-fil-A has temporarily brought back its Key Lime Lemonade and Key Lime Frozen Lemonade, which is simply the Key Lime Lemonade mixed with its signature Icedream soft serve . In addition to these two beverages, Chick-fil-A has also brought back the Grilled Spicy Deluxe chicken sandwich, with a cilantro lime sauce, for a limited run, its first since debuting in 2021. Fans of some of these items wanted them to return for years, and their absences were so long it was easy to assume they were permanent.
But their reappearance on Chick-fil-A menus, even for a limited time only, raises the possibility that they might now make more frequent appearances..
