The Bird Group operations manager Craig Williams said the store would close for the next 10 days.

Mr Williams said the group was working to minimise disruption to staff and customers with both delivery and drive-through service expected to resume by Friday, March 10, in time for the long weekend.

In-store will close for about four weeks while the refit is completed and Mr Williams hopes the 55-seat restaurant will re-open by the end of March or early April.

"The business model for us works," Mr Williams said. "The drive-through operates and it gets the majority of the team back in-store and gets the customers back through. It saves some trips to Hamilton and Colac (KFC stores) that I think are set to occur."

Mr Williams said the store would be modernised to include digital menu boards and self-serve kiosks.

He said it would be reconfigured to include a dedicated area for staff to prepare home delivery orders, which was a growing part of the business, and more space to allow it to operate more efficiently.

Mr Williams said it would be repainted and include new finishes, fittings and seating to ensure it was looking as "nice and relevant for our customers as possible".

He said the store was last renovated in 2016 and customer needs had changed since the pandemic with it introducing home delivery in the past few years.

"We're losing a couple of seats to maximise our home delivery area with that business really showing us over the last two years that it is an avenue our customers are liking," Mr Williams said.

"What we've seen from 2020 to now is we're not seeing the maxed-out restaurants. It's more the customers waiting for their takeaway meals and doing this allows us to put them through a bit more efficiently, than dedicating so much space to dine-in which isn't having as much uptake."

He said 60 to 70 per cent of its customers were drive-through while walk-in and dine-in customers were at their highest over the summer tourist season.

"Since COVID we've had a good recovery of people coming back into the restaurants but everyone seems to be accustomed to drive-through and contactless service that we saw through COVID."

The exterior will also be updated with new signage and external cladding.

"The build team got established on Monday and everyone's into it today," he told The Standard on Tuesday, February 28.

"The beloved (KFC signed) bucket and the pylons came down today so it's the first real day of work happening with the pylon coming down.

"We look forward to opening and getting everyone back through."

He said plans for a second KFC store on Raglan Parade were still in the initial stages and the group was in the process of getting surveyors in.

"We want to make sure what we build out there suits what the town needs out in that area, whether it's more drive-through capacity."

Mr Williams said a second store would spread out the drive-through traffic between the two premises "so you won't have one big packed drive-through line on a Friday night" and it would also expand its home delivery radius to other parts of city.

The "stonehenge" site was purchased in March 2022 for about $2 million around the time the councillors knocked back a $1.8 million plan to create up to 60 jobs at a new store at the Mortlake Road Northpoint shopping complex.

The project was rejected in a 6-1 vote of councillors in April, 2022 with traffic congestion a major concern.

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