Convenience stores aiming to create a limited-time offer should examine their brand strategy, existing menu items, product availability and trends and sales data.
Michelle Weckstein, director of food and beverage brands for Southwest Georgia Oil Co., which operates SunStop c-stores, starts with a staple product that aligns with the c-store chain’s brand strategy of having made-from-scratch items on their Eat’s Southern Cookin’ menu (pictured). Eat’s is SunStop’s proprietary foodservice known for comfort food such as hand-breaded fried chicken, tenders and Southern sides.
“We are building the SunStop brand as a fresh-food destination for people on the go,” she said. “Therefore, when determining LTOs to promote under the SunStop banner, we look for portability, food quality and freshness in our food items.
“LTO items promoted under that brand need to complement existing menu offerings,” Weckstein said.
When searching for emerging food trends, Weckstein looks at:
- Quick-service restaurant (QSR) and casual dining menus and promotions, especially when traveling to bigger cities.
- Recommendations from their broadline distributor and manufacturer representatives.
- Social media posts and Pinterest recipes.
One key for SunStop is taking a staple product, or one that’s attractive to the majority of its customers and putting a spin on it. In November and December, SunStop took its breakfast platter of eggs, a breakfast protein, biscuit and grits—but substituted a sausage gravy for the grits.
“We’re really upping the biscuit and gravy offer and keeping the regular old platter with the eggs and the bacon,” Weckstein said.
In another LTO spin, SunStop added French toast sticks in place of a biscuit in an offering that included bacon or sausage and eggs. “We gave them an opportunity to try something just a little bit different.”
Once an LTO candidate is ready and tested by a team of five, SunStop brings it to designated stores with a diverse employee base for feedback. “We’ve found that a lot of our employees represent the markets in which they work, so they give us good feedback,” she said.
Test With Focus Groups
At Hunt Brothers Pizza, Nashville, Tennessee, they use focus groups to test for operational ease and consumer acceptance, said Dee Cleveland, director of marketing. Part of the process is ensuring the adjectives they’re assigning a product align with customer expectations.
“If you want to do a fiery chipotle, you may want to use a focus group to determine how hot is hot, and are you explaining the product in the best way?” she said. “You don’t want to call something ‘super spicy’ if it’s really more mild. And that’s pretty subjective, but that’s why you do focus groups, to get a more broader group of individuals on the right path.”
It’s important for retailers to ask themselves, “Does my description support this product and talk about it the right way, and is the price point reasonable?” Cleveland said. It’s also key to be sure of a product before starting a market test, which can be costly, she adds.
In addition to in-house testing at SunStop, the c-store chain works with its food distributor, Houston-based Sysco, which makes suggestions based on trends it sees in restaurants. “They give us a heads-up about what’s coming and even help us develop recipes and figure out how to cook their products in the equipment we have,” Weckstein said.
“If McDonald’s threw the McRib on their everyday menu, it wouldn’t sell nearly as well.”
At Birmingham, Alabama-based Chester’s Chicken, a QSR with 1,100 locations in c-stores, truck stops and supermarkets, a small team meets quarterly and develops a list of about 20 LTO ideas, said William Culpepper, vice president of marketing.
From there, they narrow the list to about half, selecting candidates that “we think are really going to help solve a problem for our operator,” he said. “Will the LTO simplify operations, win a new customer, strengthen the brand?”
Chester’s then examines execution of the LTO and talks to its suppliers, who bring in products Chester’s samples for taste, and asks, “Can we get these products all over the country to our locations?” Culpepper said. “And then, maybe most importantly: How much does it cost?”
The team narrows candidates to two or three that “can drive value, he said, and those finalists undergo market testing, where they set up in locations and work with the store’s team to prepare the product and get feedback on ease of preparation. They also have customers sample the product and conduct surveys.
After that, “We have three good samples of real live testing, and that usually makes it easy to settle on what we’re going to go to market with,” Culpepper said.
Consistency Is Key
Steve Morris, president of St. Paul, Minnesota-based Retail Management Inc., which manages convenience stores for investor groups and individuals, noted the importance of maintaining menu consistency while sprinkling in LTOs.
“I’ve always supported an LTO program to bring newness to a program while maintaining operational feasibility,” he said. But, he adds, “Making it complex for the stores to execute is never in anyone’s favor.”
Morris said he rarely sees an item and thinks it’ll be on the permanent menu—even if it’s highly successful when introduced. This is due to what he calls “The McRib Effect.”
This effect is the creating of anticipation for an item—he also mentioned the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake—that isn’t on the regular menu. “They create that desire,” he said. “That’s what good LTOs are.”
“We’re really upping the biscuit and gravy offer and keeping the regular old platter with the eggs and the bacon.”
“If McDonald’s threw the McRib on their everyday menu, it wouldn’t sell nearly as well,” he said.
LTOs create the newness in what can easily be very stale food programs, Morris said.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s dispensed beverage, roller grill, made-to-cook, even packaged deli, right? Those programs can become appealingly stale,” he said. “Not visually, but just emotionally stale.”
Another reason to keep an LTO an LTO is menu capability, said Morris, who always considers difficulty of execution. If an LTO is doing so well that it needs to be on the permanent menu, then another product probably needs to be removed, he said.
Because customers expect certain menu items, a retailer must be careful to not remove a staple, such as a standard hotdog, for a brand-new Tornado flavor regardless of how well it’s selling, he said.
Retailers must have an excellent understanding of what their core stable of products needs to be, he said. “And don’t lose sight that people come to expect those things. You may not sell a ton of them, but there are certain requirements for entry into foodservice programs. I can’t ever get rid of regular coffee to put a flavor LTO in. We’d never do it.”
“We gave them an opportunity to try something just a little bit different.”
Another benefit of LTOs is the possibility of boosting the frequency of the occasional customer, particularly those who want to try a new product.
“Perhaps they don’t stop at your location all the time, so everything is new, but they’re unlikely to get a ham and cheese sandwich because that’s just ‘Everyday Joe,’” Morris said. “If I have a ham and cheese sandwich, but I swap out the bread with a tortilla for a wrap, now I’ve created a little flair and differentiation for an LTO. Maybe I put in the customer’s mind someplace to try something new.”
Morris said they have this success with an LTO cheeseburger program, where every other month they introduce a new cheeseburger with a different filling. One entry uses peanut butter, with blackberry jam in the bun.
“We had folks who were coming three days a week for dinner with their family,” Morris said. “If I’d have put that on the [regular] menu, that customer wouldn’t have been there two to three days a week.”
Eye on Calendar
When planning LTOs, retailers should schedule them for slow spots on the calendar, Hunt Brother Pizza’s Cleveland said, noting that people seek more value-oriented offers at the start of the year coming out of the holidays. “Their mindset is savings, and everyone’s doing their New Year’s resolution.”
Value-oriented promotional LTOs also appear during back-to-school season because people are buying school clothes and supplies, Cleveland said. “Around the holidays, people are a little more abundant and splurgy, and there usually are higher-ticket items or more add-ons that will go into play.”
Get Attention
Once an LTO is ready to go, it needs to be promoted. At Chester’s Chicken, Culpepper said they work boosting the capture rate of those entering the c-store with eye-catching promotions and by having fun.
A recent promotion is Battle of the Bites, where customers can vote on their favorite Frank’s RedHot sauce to be used with Chester’s chicken bites.
“We’re featuring Honey Stung versus Sweet Chili,” Culpepper said. “There’s engagement and maybe that increases the capture rate for the operator, which is huge for them if they get five guests who may not have purchased Chester’s that day to come to the counter and take a look.”
This promotion is “different, though in a good way,” Culpepper said. “It’s not just, ‘Here’s a new thing.’ You’re having more fun with it. One of our core values is ‘Fried chicken is fun,’ so we are trying to make everything we do have that component of fun.”