Wingstop calls itself “the wing experts.”
But Michael Skipworth, CEO of the 2,800-location fast casual chicken chain, likes to highlight a different distinction he’s proud of, having nothing to do with food. “People don’t think about a chicken wing restaurant being a digital powerhouse,” Skipworth tells me.
Today, after spending years taking cues from outside the restaurant industry—airlines, beauty brands—he has built exactly that: a thriving e-commerce business that just happens to sell America’s favorite protein.
In the second quarter of 2025, diners spent more than $1 billion at the 31-year-old chain, ordering wings—boneless and bone-in—and chicken tenders in custom combinations of 12 flavors ranging from Original Hot to Spicy Korean Q to Mango Habanero. (Popeye’s, for comparison, reported $1.5 billion in sales in Q2.)
They placed nearly three-quarters of those orders through digital channels including Wingstop’s app, MyWingstop.
Over the past several years, Skipworth, who has been CEO since 2022, has invested $50 million in rebuilding the company’s tech stack from scratch. The decision to rely on proprietary technology helped the company assemble a database of nearly 60 million customers it can target (and retarget) with timely, personalized ads and promotions that encourage repeat visits and larger orders.
That’s exactly what happened when Wingstop reintroduced its crispy chicken tenders earlier this year. A record number of new customers showed up to try them, while others found a reason to come back. During Wingstop’s July earnings call, Skipworth said that the revamped menu item drove reactivation of lapsed customers “at a level we haven’t seen from any menu innovation in the past two years.”
Although the company saw a rare drop in same-store sales last quarter, its first in three years (Skipworth attributed the 1.9% drop to temporary consumer anxiety), overall sales are up 14% and revenue is up 12%. Already this year, Wingstop has opened as many stores as it did in all of 2023; it’s on pace to surpass 2024’s net new openings, too.
Recently, Skipworth talked to Fast Company about Wingstop’s tech wins, including AI-enhanced kitchen revamps that cut order wait times in half, and its first-ever loyalty program, launching next year.
Years ago, Wingstop decided to stop using third-party companies for online orders, opting to build its own system, MyWingstop, from scratch. How’s it going?
We went live a little over a year ago, and since then we’ve seen our digital customer database grow by 30% to almost 60 million strong and growing. Today, digital sales are over 70% of our sales mix.
You’ve publicly credited this customer database with boosting the successful relaunch of chicken tenders earlier this year. How did that happen?
During the relaunch of tenders, we leveraged MyWingstop to target specific consumers who we thought, based on experience or look-alike profiles, would be chicken tender users. We acquired a record amount of new guests during this relaunch; those new guests, as you might expect, over-index younger, most [ordering for one]. We also reactivated lapsed users at a record pace. These lapsed users looked very different from the new guests; they’re a little bit older and placing larger orders, likely for a family.
This all speaks to the long-term opportunity we have for tenders. There are 1.6 billion chicken tenders served annually in the U.S., and we feel like we’re just scratching the surface.
How many of the 1.6 billion are yours?
Not enough! Not nearly enough.
As a parent of young children, I can confirm that my household consumes its fair share of chicken tenders. How do you find these lapsed and potential diners, like me?
Our customer database is more than email, phone number, name, and order history. We invest and enrich that data to have over 300 data points on every single guest. It has a lot to do with what else our guests are interested in, what other brands they engage with, what platforms they’re on. We can get really targeted on social and in paid search.
Some Wingstop locations are using AI in the kitchen now, to help cooks and other back-of-house employees. What do these “smart kitchens” do?
We’re roughly a 30-year-old brand and really haven’t invested much of anything, up until this point, in back-of-house technology. We built an AI-enabled machine learning model customized to every restaurant, telling employees what to anticipate in 15-minute increments so they can get in front of demand. We built a kitchen display system that uses imagery and gamification and swiping, all things our young workforce is used to doing with their phones. It also includes a consumer-facing order-ready screen that shows where their order is in the process of being made and when it’s ready.
In a traditional Wingstop kitchen, they’re running paper kitchen tickets and relying on voice commands across the kitchen. It’s pretty remarkable to think with that level of—I’ll call it an unsophisticated back-of-house—to be delivering an average unit volume of $2.1 million. But in this traditional model, our standard quote time is 20 minutes. When restaurants get busy, like on a Friday night, it can get up to 45 minutes. With this new kitchen operating platform, we’ve been able to cut that time down significantly, delivering an average speed of service of 10 minutes.
During your last earnings report, you referenced general consumer uncertainty and anxiety. How is that affecting the way you are leading the company into 2026?
We’re in a unique position. We don’t play in those $3, $5 value wars. That’s just not our model, and it’s not how consumers engage with our brand. We lean into quality—every order at Wingstop is cooked to order, hand-sauced, and tossed. Our ranch and blue cheese are made from scratch in the restaurant every day. So we lean into ways to showcase quality and abundance, and consumers see value there. We’re also building a loyalty program right now, the first for Wingstop.
What should Wingstop fans expect from your loyalty program?
It’s not going to look like others in the restaurant space. Most brands that launch loyalty are doing it to acquire data about their customer. We already have that data, so it’s about more than driving sign-ups and having to discount and give away. We’re going to lean into making customers feel special, making them feel unique, all through personalization.
Our program is going to be about status and what that unlocks for you: early access to flavors, for example. We’re taking most of our inspiration from outside of restaurants, like the airline industry and brands like Sephora and Ulta and the programs they’ve designed that drive personalized engagement.
In the spirit of personalization, what’s your Wingstop order?
I’m an all-flats, bone-in lemon pepper, and then tenders with original hot. And ranch, no question.
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