Taco Bell Restaurants: Restaurant Structural Engineering in the Pacific Northwest

Location: 22 cities in Oregon and Washington, from Warrenton and Portland to Medford, Hermiston and Kennewick
Client/Owner: Yum Brands franchisees (Weber Enterprises; Bell-Co)
Partners: Rodd Hansen, AIA; Affolter, West & Jones; Nir Pearlson, Architect; GLMV Architecture; Bentley Construction (contractor)
Year: 2003–2016
Size/scale: About 27 restaurants and some 50 separate jobs, plus drive-through awning checks for 13 Oregon stores
JBE services: Site-specific structural design and review of prototype plans; new stores and scrape-and-rebuilds; remodels and tenant infill; construction-phase support; civil design on at least one new store; damage repair
Sector: Restaurants

Taco Bell restaurant structural engineering project, Eugene, Oregon — photo 3

The challenge

Each site is different — an existing store to remodel, an old building to scrape and replace, or a new pad — but the owner needs a permit-ready design in whichever jurisdiction the store sits. Yum’s prototype plans are a starting point, not a permit set: each one has to be checked and adapted for the local code edition, wind exposure, seismic design category and soils. Older stores bring their own puzzles. One Eugene restaurant was a masonry building from the 1960s.

Project photos

What we did

We’ve partnered with Yum Brands franchisees to provide designs for tenant infill work on Taco Bell restaurants in Oregon and Washington, as well as new and replacement structures. On new stores we take the prototype — such as the wood-framed T-Y07 we used in Dallas, Oregon — and design it for the site: shear walls, glulam headers, foundations and the lateral loads for that location, with truss and concrete submittals reviewed during construction. In Newberg, Portland and Lebanon, old stores were scraped and rebuilt.

Remodels mean working with what’s there. On 7th Street in Eugene we pulled the original 1967 drawings and designed the remodel in phases. At Gateway in Springfield we took off the heavy tile roof and raised the walls to give the store a cleaner front, and we came back years later to repair it after a vehicle strike. We’ve also checked drive-through awnings for more than a dozen stores, and provided civil design on at least one new build.

The result

Some 27 Taco Bell restaurants in 22 cities have our structural work behind them. One franchisee group kept coming back for more than a decade, from 2003 to 2016. A franchisee that comes back store after store is the best measure of restaurant structural engineering in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s the kind of relationship we work to keep.