Ever wondered what goes on inside when you pull into a Drive Thru lane. Businessweek covers the life inside a QSR, the technology advancements and the operational innovations.

Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru

Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you'll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald's (MCD), Wendy's (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: "I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day."