A new Chick-fil-A restaurant will begin serving the Queen Creek community on Thursday, June 6, with Nate Walker as the independent franchised local owner and operator of the new Chick-fil-A at Ironwood and Ocotillo roads, located at 30 W. Ocotillo Road.
The new location will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, with the drive-thru open until 11 p.m. Designed for speed and efficiency, this drive-thru-focused restaurant will offer drive-thru and "Mobile Thru," a fully dedicated lane in the drive-thru where guests can pick up orders placed ahead of time on the Chick-fil-A App. The restaurant will also offer third party delivery, carryout from a walk-up window and outdoor seating for guests who have placed carryout orders.
The newest Queen Creek location joins more than 40 other Chick-fil-A restaurants serving the wider Phoenix market.
Chick-fil-A’s franchise model is essential to how the restaurant serves others. Most Chick-fil-A restaurants are owned and operated by a single individual, which means Chick-fil-A’s local owner-operators are small business owners, not passive investors, who work in their restaurants side by side with their team members each day.
In Queen Creek, Walker will be responsible for all day-to-day activities of the business, including employing approximately 150 full- and part-time team members serving guests, cultivating relationships with local organizations and businesses, and tailoring philanthropic efforts to meet the Queen Creek community’s needs.
Walker has proudly called Phoenix home for almost 15 years. A self-proclaimed raving fan of Chick-fil-A, Walker and his family once traveled to Chick-fil-A openings across the country when new restaurants would host grand opening festivities.
Walker’s Chick-fil-A journey is a true embodiment of building a career from the ground up: after working as an enrollment counselor at a local college and completing his MBA in the evenings, he received a call from a recruiter to join his local Chick-fil-A restaurant. Walker worked his way up through the restaurant before joining the Chick-fil-A Leadership Development Program, which provided him the opportunity to support restaurant openings across the country, gaining valuable hands-on experience to one day open his own Chick-fil-A restaurant.
“Phoenix is home, and I look forward to serving guests in my home and community,” Walker said. “I’m most excited about being a local owner-operator that cares deeply about our guests and seeks to enrich the lives of the community and our team members, and I hope that Chick-fil-A Ironwood and Ocotillo will be a space for guests to create lifelong memories.”
The Chick-fil-A business is built to add positive impact beyond profit, including giving back to local communities. Chickfil-A local owner-operators are empowered to support the neighborhoods they serve with a key focus on hunger, education and specific community needs.
In celebration of the Queen Creek opening, Chick-fil-A, Inc. has donated $25,000 to Feeding America in honor of the new restaurant. These funds will be distributed to partners in the greater Phoenix area to aid in the fight against hunger.
Walker’s restaurant will plan to participate in the Chick-fil-A Shared Table program, an initiative that redirects surplus food from the restaurant to local soup kitchens, shelters, food banks and nonprofits in need. To date, more than 25 million meals have been created from Chick-fil-A Shared Table donations from over 2,000 Chick-fil-A restaurants throughout the U.S. and Canada.
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