Although customer adoption and awareness of the metaverse are still low, there’s a proliferation of virtual world platforms that already exist (Fortnite, Roblox, Decentraland, Sandbox and Horizon Worlds, to name a few). Many food and dining brands are already running tests in these different environments.

Here are some examples of what food service players have been trying.

Online metaverse gaming

One international fast food chain opened a virtual restaurant on Meta’s Horizon Worlds app, where customers can play virtual basketball and see promotions.

Roblox virtual food

Another American fast casual chain leveraged Roblox (a platform allowing users to create and share games) to let players earn in-experience currency for real-world items and prepare and serve virtual food. The brand also launched a real-world menu item inspired by the metaverse community.

Metaverse restaurants serving home delivery

Many global restaurant chains have filed metaverse trademark applications for various virtual items and business models, such as "operating a virtual restaurant online featuring home delivery.”

Despite the enthusiasm from brands within food and dining and other industries, mass customer adoption of the metaverse is still largely hypothetical. However, Generation Alpha, the generation born between 2010 and 2024, is currently the largest age demographic engaging in metaverse platforms. Two-thirds of Roblox users are under the age of 16, meaning that as this generation grows up, metaverse users will have the spending power to use in this online economy.

But whether brands are thinking long-term strategy or deciding what to invest in right now, there are several ways they can create value in the metaverse.

For brands, loyalty programs have two main benefits: increasing transaction volume by improving guest count/guest frequency and building out first-party customer data. Loyalty program activations in the metaverse can do both very well. This is key for brands that are currently working through loyalty program (re)designs by reframing loyalty from a discount vehicle (transactional earn and burn) to a value proposition for customers.

New loyalty programs will grow brand affinity, relevance and connection in new, more integrated ways. It would be a huge miss for brands to limit their thinking about loyalty program design to the physical world.

There are great examples of quick-service restaurant (QSR) brands experimenting with analog gamification, but these often come with not insignificant overhead.

Gamification in the metaverse is far more natural and can leverage technology, such as blockchains and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), that specifically address some of the challenges of gamification in real life (IRL). Online brand activations can create additional ways for brands to learn more about their customers and increase signals, which can help to build toward more sophisticated personalization.

Brands can struggle to find unique program benefits for “true” loyalty members, and online events serve as a unique way to create higher levels of customer engagement than would be practically possible IRL.
Brands already use celebrity partnerships to increase brand profile and relevance. Unique “members-only” access to events in the metaverse are a natural extension and amplify all of the benefits brands are already reaping from celebrity tie-ups.

Fast-food brands today can increase their relevance to a few key audiences to continue to promote growth and brand health, specifically young families and wealthier, more digitally savvy consumer segments.

While these audiences aren’t yet all adopters of metaverse technology, fast-food brands may have unique opportunities to help get them there. Because kids’ meal toys have long been both a blessing and a curse to parents, and COVID-19 has fundamentally shifted the prominence of the play area in creating a draw for kids, the metaverse can be used as a new tool to attract and engage parents and kids in feel-good ways that reduce waste, create fun, leverage existing license partnerships and possibly extend to quasi-educational programs that improve the brand’s reputation.

Fast-food companies are, in many ways, real estate experts, with a clear understanding of how to optimize store placement within markets to maximize revenue. Brands should absolutely start thinking now about how the metaverse should play into their real estate strategy when it comes to the facilitation of increased online and virtual ordering.

While there are still significant real estate and technology challenges connected to this effort—most notably real estate portfolio optimization, ghost kitchens and point of sale extensibility—some restaurant patents demonstrate that they are already thinking about how they can allow customers to purchase food in the metaverse that will show up via delivery IRL.