“The Castle of Tomorrow.”
It’s a lofty description for the new design of a 100-year-old burger chain. How “tomorrow” could a place that sells sliders get, after all?
This new prototype from Ohio-based White Castle earns the description, though.
While other concepts tinker with elements like AI ordering and kitchen robotics, the Castle of Tomorrow makes White Castle one of the first legacy brands to truly integrate these elements into its design.
“White Castle is one of the leaders in test-and-learn and fail-and-iterate in the areas of AI and robotics,” says Rob Seely, associate vice president of operations, strategy and design for WD Partners. “They’ve been doing that for quite a while, and they got to the point where they felt comfortable with the idea of developing a prototype that truly integrated these things, rather than just continuing to add them on to existing locations.”
Based outside of Columbus, Ohio, just a short drive from the White Castle headquarters, WD Partners was involved in all aspects of this prototype’s creation, including strategy, kitchen design, interior design and technology integration.
The prototype’s exterior transform into “Night Castle” in an effort to capture late night customers. Images courtesy of White Castle
That was a big task made bigger by the legacy and lore behind a century-old burger brand with a devoted following. White Castle’s new design had to center not just technology but also what people love about White Castle as an experience.
WD partners, then, started this project by visiting more than 60 locations across the country, learning about what makes White Castle special to both guests and employees.
Thanks to the long history of the brand, WD Partners found, “a certain level of nostalgia and pride comes with it,” says Mat Gurda, senior creative director, environments with WD Partners. It’s something he’s seen in his own family. “My grandfather is wheelchair-bound. When he goes to a hospital down in Westchester County, they stop at White Castle because that’s what he’s always done. He’s 90 years old, and that’s still something that he cares about. There is this consistency and tradition that comes with a trip to White Castle, it’s almost a ritual.”
Respecting these rituals and the feelings White Castle invokes, then, became a core goal of the redesign project, just as important as the technology integration.
White Castle’s signature blue is the key color of the new design’s interior.
Introducing Julia
While ritual and tradition are important, The Castle of Tomorrow’s technology is still the headliner.
One of the most important elements of this new prototype is a piece of technology that guests can’t see or touch. Instead, it’s something they can talk to: an artificial intelligence system that takes orders in the drive-thru. White Castle has dubbed the bot “Julia,” after a beloved long-time employee. Julia can take orders, answer questions and promote LTOs, just like a person working the drive-thru lane. And while Julia obviously isn’t human, the chain has worked hard to keep the human touch in the drive-thru experience.
First and foremost, Julia is optional. If a drive-thru customer doesn’t want to order through an AI agent, they can simply say so. A human employee then takes over.
This same employee monitors all customer interactions with the AI. If a customer ordering through Julia runs into trouble, the staffer takes over, says Gurda.
“When White Castle introduces technology, they do it in a way that still allows them to have control and to make the human element readily available. They want to make that [AI ordering] experience more approachable for people who may be using it for the first time, which is quite a few,” says Gurda.
The chain also built a failsafe into the ordering process. When customers arrive at the pick-up area, an employee confirms the order and can make corrections in case Julia made a mistake.
Once the order is finalized and assembled, an employee then delivers food through a hospitality door, not a standard window. This feature, says Seely, is an example of how White Castle is using technology not to just reduce labor costs but to redeploy labor in a way that improves the guest experience. Instead of paying an employee to be a disembodied voice punching in orders on the other side of a speaker, that employee can now interact with customers face-to-face, providing a higher level of customer service and better human interaction.
The interior includes wood-style ceramic tile flooring and open duct works.
Iconic Execution
Improving the experience for drive-thru guests was only one goal of this new prototype, according to the WD Partners team. The company also wanted to make life easier for third-party delivery drivers. To that end, it created a vestibule with a pick-up window for online orders.
This area is positioned so delivery drivers can get to it quickly from the parking lot. It’s situated to avoid mixing pedestrians with drive-thru traffic. And, while the main dining room has an entryway, the pick-up window vestibule has a dedicated door of its own, making it easy for drivers to retrieve orders without disturbing dine-in guests.
This thoughtful bit of design is enhanced by the design of the structure itself. The mobile pickup area has dedicated signage and is solid black, allowing it to stand out compared to the rest of the structure, which consists mainly of traditional white vertical tiles.
Other elements of the design highlight the chain’s iconic castle exterior, but with a more modern expression. Chief among these are the classic crenellations — the alternating notched patterns of solid projections and open spaces along the top of a parapet or castle wall — found on the exterior of White Castle restaurants.
In earlier White Castle designs, the crenellations were built into the structure itself. In The Castle of Tomorrow, they are achieved with a more economical black metal frame attached to the building. Crenellations can also be found on the awning above the mobile pick-up door and the structure shielding the dumpster.
“It’s not meant to be super theme-y. They were not trying to do medieval knights or the Ren Faire. They’re very careful not to go that far, but obviously, with a name like White Castle, there’s still a lot of those references throughout,” says Gurda.
Another key element of the exterior is the White Castle sign itself. During the day, the sign features the traditional White Castle logo. At night, however, thanks to some LEDs and smart film, it shifts to a black-and-white “Night Castle” sign, accompanied by exterior lights that go from white to a moodier blue. This sleek bit of branding is part of an effort to attract guests looking for late-night food offerings, states Gurda.
“They know they’re a late-night destination,” says Gurda. “That’s one of the first conversations we had with them: How do we take back the 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. segment, and how do we own that segment against our competitors? That was one of the driving factors in this new concept, this notion of Night Castle.”
The new pick-up window is easily accessible to delivery drivers without disrupting the dine-in experience.
Highlighting “The Show”
While the chain wants to reclaim its connection to late-night customers, designers intentionally created an interior that appeals to daytime crowds. So the new prototype’s dining area, says Gurda, is bright, approachable and family-friendly. The key colors are blue and orange, the same ones found in the White Castle logo.
The blue can be seen on everything from tiles on the face of the POS counter and behind the soda machine to the painted duct work. The orange is used more sparingly, primarily on the metal frames for chairs that accompany banquette seating.
The banquette itself is upholstered in a blue colored custom fabric based on the slider in the White Castle logo and is paired with movable tables, allowing it to accommodate groups of different sizes. The dining area also has a standard-height community table with outlets and high-top seating against a window.
While the White Castle dining area is compact, even by today’s QSR standards, getting all these seating options was important for the prototype’s success, says Gurda, as they cover White Castle’s most common dine-in use cases, from individuals working on their laptop to contractors sitting at a high-top spot for a quick lunch.
The dining area also has several touches that emphasize the brand and its history. Among these is a custom wallpaper showcasing White Castle advertisements from the brand’s 100-plus years. Other signature elements include bathroom sconces inspired by sliced pickles and a photo of the Ingram family, owners of the concept since its founding in 1921. And because of the brand’s cult-favorite status, the Castle of the Future prototype also includes a small merchandising display at the POS counter.
The most prominent part of the dine-in experience is behind the POS counter. According to Aaron Ruef, senior account director for WD Partners, one goal of the new design was to highlight how fresh White Castle’s food is. Everything on the menu is made to order and nothing is sitting in a holding area for long periods waiting to be served. Therefore the slider assembly area, dubbed “The Show,” sits just behind the order counter, in full view of customers. Above it, on the hood, is an orange sign announcing, “Fresh Hot Sliders,” inviting guests to watch as their sliders are prepared.
Robots and Redeploying Labor
Other elements of the kitchen aren’t displayed so prominently. One of these is a fry cook robot. While the chain is proud of its work with robotics, highlighting this piece does not align with the chain’s core message about its food.
“The idea, from a display perspective, was really about trying to convey freshness and production. It wasn’t about being cutting edge, innovation, or any of that,” says Ruef. The robot is faster but “it’s really about the freshness message more than anything.”
The addition of a robotic fry cook takes over one of the least-appealing jobs in the back of the house and allows White Castle employees to provide more time to customers.
In the prototype’s operational planning phase, tasks like assembling a slider or grabbing a drink cup were given a time, but so were various customer interactions.
“It takes 20 seconds to build a slider, but we were asked to build a task for an average of 30 seconds to greet and engage with a customer,” Seely says. “They really wanted that to be part of the operational process. Easy enough to add a task, but somewhat unorthodox to say, ‘Here’s a task just for customer engagement.’”
This focus on customer engagement even made its way into the design of the operational areas. Throughout these spaces, employee stations were positioned to make it easy for team members to see, greet and interact with customers.
What Tomorrow Offers
With only a few months of operation, White Castle and WD Partners are still evaluating The Castle of Tomorrow’s performance. They are pleased with the early results and while there are likely to be tweaks in future restaurants, nothing has been determined yet.
Similarly, the elements of The Castle of Tomorrow that will be implemented in legacy stores is still under review, says Seely. The team understood that retrofitting older locations was a possibility from the start, he adds.
“I think it’s safe for us to say that as we were going through the development of this new prototype — everything from operations to the environment — there was this lens of, ‘Are there components of this that we believe that we would be able to build into some sort of remodel strategy…that they could get their biggest bang for their
buck on?’”
The exact role the Castle of Tomorrow will play systemwide is TBD. The project itself, however, shows that a legacy brand can embrace technology and improve operations without sacrificing what guests love about the experience.
Project Team
WD Partners handled architecture, interior design and kitchen design for White Castle's new prototype. The project team included:
- Aaron Ruef, Sr. Account Director
- Stefan Della Gatta, Project Manager
- Sarah Miyagawa, Director, Strategy & Insights
- Mat Gurda, Sr. Creative Director
- Ambriah Philips, Designer, Environments
- Meagan Chambers-Lindquist, Sr. Art Director
- Rob Seely, AVP, Operations Strategy & Design
- Jennifer Baxter, Associate Director, Operations Engineer
- Heather Art, Associate Manager, Foodservice Designer
- Thom Morbitzer, Sr. Director, Design Development
- Evan Hickey, Sr. Project Architect
General Contractor: Arlington Construction
Snapshot
- Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio
- Unit count: 345+
- Location of new store: Columbus, Ohio
- Opened: October 2025
- Size: 2,584 square feet
- Real estate: Free Standing
- Design highlights: Fully redesigned interior that elevates the guest experience while keeping the signature Castle vibe alive; new kitchen that is engineered for speed, consistency and crew empowerment that puts “The Show” front and center; a new exterior leverages iconic elements from the White Castle flagship locations and blends them with modern experience touch points and digital activations; dedicated vestibule and pick-up window for late night and mobile order pick-up.
- Build-out time: Approximately 27 weeks
