Winning AFH formats for prime high-footfall sites

Despite challenging economic conditions, away from home operators are expanding into travel hubs, retail destinations, and university campuses.

While these sites come often come with smaller footprints, limited energy capacity,
and tighter delivery options, they also attract high footfall and captive audiences, enabling operators to build awareness and sustainable revenue beyond the high street.

As a result, operators are designing compact formats that fit almost anywhere, including pop-up sites, grab-and-go counters, containers, and delivery-first sites.

To run these effectively, operators must rethink space, labour and menu design, ensuring they can deliver a strong food and drink offer and meet consumer expectations for quality convenience, and range across different dayparts and missions.

Below are three commercial drivers shaping format innovation and what they mean for foodservice suppliers supporting operators at scale.

1. Expansion into high footfall locations

As one response to falling high street footfall and site closures, away from home operators are prioritising high-footfall locations with more dependable demand, such as train stations, airports, and food courts.

Compared to high streets, these locations can have smaller footprints, more limited energy capacity, and tighter delivery windows. However, they are also places the consumers visit regularly, whether on the go or relaxing.

With consumers planning to buy food to go the same or more often in the coming months – driven by increased travel and socialising – convenience is becoming even more important.

As a result, site formats tailored to frequently visited, time-poor locations are well placed to capture spend from consumers seeking less travel time or simplified routines.

Sandwich Sandwich’s grab-and-go pop-up at London Paddington – one of the UK’s busiest transport hubs – is a recent example showing how operators are using smaller, simplified formats to fit into transport hubs.

By preparing packaged options ahead of service (instead of at the point of sale), Sandwich Sandwich reduces storage, equipment, and energy needs, while maintaining a convenient grab-and-go range perfect for time-pressed consumers.

Strip Shack, the wings and fried chicken counter at Boxpark food-court in London, offering simple grab-and-go options, like strips, dips, fries, and shakes, highlights how operators are reducing their footprint, not their range, quality or service levels.

The grab-and-go concept – designed to fit into smaller spaces, like sports venues, stadiums, and music festivals – features a simplified menu with three core ingredients that can be prepared with or without bulky extraction fan systems.

Self-service kiosks facilitate fast ordering and free up staff time, while easy-to-prepare dishes reduce wait times, making the format well-suited to high footfall, time-poor sites.

2. Lower investment, smaller formats to protect margins

With volatile input costs and rising labour expenses, one way that away from home operators are responding is by investing in formats that fit into smaller, lower-cost rental units that are faster to roll out than traditional sites.

These smaller units push operators to audit existing processes and find efficiencies,
so that they can offer high-quality food and drink with less labour needs and complexity.

Auntie Anne’s highlights how operators are designing low-cost formats that fit into almost any location. Designed as low-capex, its plug-and-play container store enables the brand to stress test its food and drink offer in new locations in a low-risk way.

Bitesize Greggs is a smaller Greggs shop format selling a tighter range of best-selling products – like sausage rolls, steak bakes, and fair trade hot drinks – designed to fit into spaces without the space for a larger, traditional Greggs shop.

Built with simplification in mind, these stores make efficient use of tighter storage and operating space, reducing investment costs and enabling faster rollout to support brand expansion into high-footfall travel hubs and retail destinations.

At the same time, by featuring a rationalised menu, both Aunt Anne’s and Greggs can reach more consumers with a high-quality food and drink offer.

3. Delivery-led growth: formats built for off-premises volume

As a contactless and convenient route to food and drink, consumers are increasingly turning to delivery - with 4 in 10 ordering food and drink delivery at least once a month.

This shift aligns with our wider trend for 2026 – convenience – where consumers are favouring frictionless ordering that enables them to save time accessing food and drink.

While most operators offer takeaway in some form, some are investing in delivery-first brands or repurposing existing sites with more cookline space, packaging stations, and processes designed for efficient peak-time preparation.

Honi Poké offers one of the most recent examples. It is evolving Island Poké into a delivery first-business in response to shifting consumer behaviours, with in-store dining centring on lunch and convenience missions and delivery playing a larger role in evening and group dining.

By investing in a delivery-first brand (Island Poké), Honi Poké can reach new consumers across more missions while maintaining brand awareness and trust across channels.

Focusing on distinct channels also allows it to design sites and position food and drink in a way that resonates most with consumers across dine-in and takeout sites.

Key supplier takeaways

1. Enable high quality food and drink in constrained spaces
   Develop preprepared, prepackaged, or part assembled ingredients or products that reduce equipment, storage and energy needs on site – protecting food quality while freeing space for service and throughput.

2. Be route to market ready for non-traditional locations
   Audit distribution capabilities to ensure access to travel hubs, retail destinations, and campuses. Strengthen relationships with specialist wholesalers and account for restricted delivery windows, access rules, and security requirements.

3. Remove prep time to protect speed and labour efficiency
   Prioritise ingredients that eliminate preparation, alongside portion controlled dispense or assembly solutions that support fast service, consistent quality, and predictable labour needs.

4. Help operators simplify without diluting menus 
   Support menu rationalisation through versatile core ingredients and complementary accompaniments, enabling operators to deliver perceived choice and premium cues with fewer SKUs and less operational complexity.

5. Design products for delivery-first operating models
   Provide pre-portioned options, delivery-stable components, and add-ons that are easy to assemble and replenish at peak times, helping operators meet high evening and group order demand without disrupting core operations.

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