Red Flags in Your QSR Training Program | Built to Scale or Bound to Fail?

The Quick Service Restaurants industry is a juggernaut in the American economy, with more than $350 billion in revenue in 2025 alone.

Known for fan-favorite menu items and a popular brand that resonates deeply with consumers, it’s an industry built for scalers.

Of the top 50 national QSR chains, each averages just under 3,000 branches and $2.13 million in annual revenue per location. The business models, dining experiences, and menu offerings at fast casual restaurants are designed for expansion, and the predominant motivator for QSR owners is to grow and take the brand further.

But if expansion charges ahead without the right training in place, the whole operation can go off the rails.

Training for the fast dining industry means overcoming many challenging hurdles. These include high turnover rates, the need to maintain standards across a large number of branches, technology and language barriers, and the need for customized, efficient learning that doesn’t slow down the workflow.

In this Rootwurks free guide, we’ll look at seven red flags in training that can stifle any QSR expansion plan. It also includes a short quiz to gauge how many of these red flags have been planted in your training plans, and how to remove them.

You may have seen this before. A new hire or one undergoing new training is given guidance in English, even though it isn’t their native language. Perhaps you’ve been the one nodding and smiling, hoping it's not obvious.

The 'nod and smile' method might get you through a social dinner in a foreign language, but it’s a liability on the QSR floor.

According to statistics compiled by the National Restaurant Association, 29% of restaurant and food service workers don’t speak English at home. Moving up the ladder, 28% of managers and 23% of supervisors speak a language other than English at home.

A 2025 comprehensive review published in Current Research in Nutrition and Food Science stated that research has found that “food safety training conducted in the native languages of migrant workers translates to a 50% knowledge gain.”

The impact of this training shortcoming can be grave. Employees feign understanding in an attempt to be polite, even though they have not actually grasped the safety or SOP requirements. Without this understanding, they may be much more likely to commit food safety violations and less able to maintain quality standards.

The best intentions and most sophisticated training methods mean little if learners cannot understand the language in which guidance is given. Multilingual training is a must.

At a quick-service restaurant, so much of training and safety rests on the shoulders of your veteran employees.

Your veteran employees can be the best mentors your new hires could ask for. During onboarding, it makes sense for management to tell new hires to shadow a veteran employee on the restaurant floor. The “go follow Mike around” approach can be an effective way for new hires to learn real-life applications of workplace training, but it can’t be a 1-for-1 replacement for standardized training or certified food safety managers.

Why the shadowing method falls short

The traditional form of training, where a manager heads into a break room, dims the lights, and throws on an instructional video, will almost always fall short. This is especially true for QSRs. where the pace is hectic, the profit margins and margins of error are slim, and turnover is high.

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve theory asserts that memory retention fades quickly if we don’t work to retain it. For fast dining establishments, this means training that is reinforced “in-the-flow-of-work” is more likely to be retained as processes become second nature for employees.

Training that happens in a breakroom won’t be reinforced in real time and may, at times, appear more theoretical to employees than actual on-the-job training.

This form of training takes employees away from the workfloor, slowing down productivity and creating a feeling among employees that tahe training is divorced from the work, and an administrative burden that they have to check off a box.

Training should happen where work happens. It should be augmented with digital training assets integrated into the workplace to guide employees through tasks in real time and enforce key safety guidelines throughout the workday.

In addition, “the breakroom PowerPoint” training format falls short because it doesn’t empower employees to take an active role in the training. It positions training as a necessary lecture to sit through, rather than an exchange of ideas and best practices reinforced in real time.

In 2023, McDonald’s reported that in the final quarter of 2022, mobile order-and-pay purchases accounted for 35% of sales in the chain’s 6 biggest markets. And in 2024, the National Restaurant Association published a report finding that 52% of restaurant operators plan to incorporate technology into back-office functions such as payroll and compliance.

Clearly, in an era of QR-code menus, food delivery apps, and AI-generated branding and ad campaigns, traditional training methods need a digital makeover.

Unfortunately, too many fast casual eateries still rely on paper training manuals kept in greasy, well-worn binders somewhere in the back office.

Without naming any specific burger chains, QSRs pioneered the dining concept of “having things your way.” Shouldn’t your company’s training be the same?

Every fast casual restaurant has a unique menu, branding, and overall company DNA. But too often, companies lean on generic training methods that don’t directly address their establishment's safety and quality control needs, resulting in poor outcomes.

Ardent Learning’s 2024-2025 industry analysis cited research that found training aligned with real-world scenarios that directly affect a learner’s job is 55% more effective than generic training.

Stay Unique, Stay Engaged

In almost any line of work, most employees don’t care for being taken away from their daily tasks to perform necessary training. The work won’t stop while they’re gone, and they’ll still have all the same tasks to perform before they can clock out.

The key is to keep them engaged. Employees who are engaged in the learning are far more likely to retain the training because they see it as relevant to their workday. If they’re herded into the breakroom and the manager throws on a training video that looks stuck in the 90s, in which the restaurant looks nothing like where they work, they’re much more likely to check out.

From the moment that a new employee is brought on board, fast dining establishments are in a costly race against time.

An industry study published in 2023 found that in 2022, only 54% of QSR employees stayed at a new job for more than 90 days before quitting. Also, in 2022, the National Restaurant Association listed 6 main reasons employees leave hospitality companies, including lack of growth opportunities (23%), pay/benefits (22%), poor job fit (20%), and workplace culture (17%).

Many of these employees may see leaving within 90 days as a way to cut their losses and get to the next, better job sooner rather than later.