Amy’s Drive Thru marks a successful first year

In its first year, Amy’s Drive Thru served up a half-million veggie burger patties.

Impressive. But for many diners, the key numeric question surrounding the organic, vegetarian fast-food restaurant is: Where will Amy’s put outlet number two?

The most common request by patrons to the Rohnert Park eatery involves obtaining a drive thru closer to home, even when the diners hail from Canada or Australia. The second-most common plea is to be sold a franchise.

“We have requests from every state” for new eateries, said Andy Berliner, who with his wife, Rachel, started the drive thru one year ago as an offshoot of their ever-expanding Amy’s Kitchen natural foods company.

For now there is just one Amy’s Drive Thru. But the Berliners and the managers of the Petaluma-based company believe they have created a winner in this distinct alternative to traditional fast food dining. The restaurant’s veggie burgers, fries, burritos, pizzas, salads and milkshakes all are organic. Only the sodas don’t qualify for that label, and even they are free of preservatives.

The privately held company isn’t disclosing eatery sales numbers, but “we’re doing about double what we thought we would,” said Paul Schiefer, director of restaurant operations. Before the restaurant opened in mid-July of 2015, managers estimated the drive thru would serve about 80 shakes a day. Instead, on busy days the staff there makes about 500.

“We definitely see a bright future for this concept,” Schiefer said. One reason for the optimism: the majority of customers at the meatless restaurant aren’t vegetarian.

But enough with the preliminaries. Patrons want the scoop on what Schiefer calls the “big secret,” the possible location of the next drive thru. Andy Berliner agreed to give a hint.

“I’m 80 percent sure it will be Marin County,” he said. He hopes to open there in about 18 months.

Rachel Berliner cautioned that “nothing is firm” but “it’s very exciting.”

Change is afoot both for Amy’s and the U.S. restaurant industry. The food manufacturer now employs 90 people at the drive thru and another 2,300 in its Amy’s Kitchen manufacturing operations in Santa Rosa, Oregon and Idaho.

Total revenues for the company last year approached $480 million. Amy’s Kitchen ranked fifth among all U.S. makers of frozen food single entrées, with nearly $257 million in sales, an increase of 16 percent for the 52 weeks ending May 15, according to Chicago-based market research company IRI.

Along with slowly expanding the drive thru business, the Berliners are making plans to build food manufacturing plants in New York and, in a new announcement, Portugal.

Meanwhile, in the restaurant industry the word “organic” is popping up with increasing frequency, along with such terms as “natural,” “antibiotic free,” “hormone free” and “GMO free.”

Last year the Washington-based Organic Trade Association in an annual survey highlighted Amy’s Drive Thru and other emerging restaurants that emphasize organic ingredients. Such companies include the 55-outlet Virginia-based Elevation Burger, the nation’s largest restaurant buyer of organic beef, and the 44-outlet Los Angeles-based Sweetgreen, whose five California locations include Berkeley and Palo Alto.

One edge for the drive thru is that the restaurant was birthed by a well-known natural foods company. Another distinction is the length to which the drive thru goes to provide its menu items tailored to the needs and desires of patrons. All items are offered as regular, vegan and gluten free.

For Jennifer and Jared Curtis, that amount of choice seemed too good to be true.

The family from outside Boston includes 10-year-old daughter Samantha, who has celiac disease and is so sensitive to gluten that “she gets one wrong bite and she’s in the emergency room,” said Jennifer Curtis. The family and relatives they visit here in Sonoma County have separate sets of pans to cook for both Samantha and Jennifer, who also has the disease.

But after a thorough questioning of Amy’s staff, the family has dined at the drive thru three times and planned to make a fourth visit during its 10-day vacation here.

“I had my first burrito in five or six years,” Jennifer Curtis recalled. “I was kind of pinching myself.”

She was even more pleased that she could point to the menu and tell her daughter, “You can have whatever you want. It gets you kind of emotional.”

The Curtises not only want an Amy’s near them in Massachusetts. They were hoping to inquire about operating it. However, Schiefer said, the company at this time has no plans to offer franchises.

“We have made a conscious decision to grow slower,” he said. Part of the reason is to keep the food’s quality “as consistent as possible.”

For the Berliners, welcoming people with special food needs has been one of the highlights of the first year of operation. Andy Berliner noted the restaurant has served children who “never had a milkshake” its dairy-free option. For such youngsters, he said, “there’s joy” in the experience.

Rachel Berliner, who admits to sometimes visiting the restaurant three times a week, explained that with the frozen food business, “I never get to meet the customers. And here I get to.”

After about six months, the drive thru raised prices. The Amy, a double veggie cheeseburger and the restaurant’s most popular item, now costs $4.99, up from $4.29. The price for Sweet and Super Salads each increased $1 to $8.99.

Schiefer said that the company needed to raise prices but believes “our menu provides an excellent value for the high quality, organic products we serve.”

The drive thru has added soups to the menu and this fall hopes to start serving breakfast items, he said.

For the Berliners, the times are exciting in both professional and personal ways. Their only child, Amy Berliner Ricafrente, for whom the company is named, was married a little over a year ago.

While the Berliners were speaking by phone last week, their daughter came on the call to explain that she had become pregnant about a week before the drive thru opened in July 2015.

Almost three months ago, she gave birth to her first child, a son, Malachi Berliner Ricafrente. Amy and Rachel Berliner said the newborn had the benefit of his mother’s repeated trips to the drive thru.

Said Rachel Berliner: “He’s made up of Amy’s veggie burgers.”