Keeping it simple
Retailers and hospitality companies alike are battling with the issue of avoiding complexity and keeping things simple. This scenario came to light on a recent evening out.
The Mossy Well in Muswell Hill is a relatively smart and popular JD Wetherspoon that I returned to on Burns Night for its one-week-only haggis burger. The dinner reminded me of my first visit to the pub during its opening week, when I shared a table with an old gent tucking into his evening meal. He informed me the food was not bad, but that he would not be dining there any more than three times per week.
Despite this lack of enthusiasm for the food offer, if hospitality businesses had customers like this man who visit multiple times per week, then everything would be hunky-dory across the industry. But this is not the case, and companies are battling it out to boost the frequency of their customers’ visits.
At the recent Propel Restaurant Marketer & Innovator European Summit, Mark Bentley, business development director at HDI, revealed the startling statistic that 65% of customer visits to hospitality brands are once-per-year events, thereby highlighting the lack of frequency across the industry.
What to do about this situation? It is certainly driving unprecedented activity in loyalty programmes, as well as fuelling the rise of limited time offer (LTO) items on menus.
The latter certainly worked with me last week as the haggis burger pulled me into giving a nod to Robert Burns in a Wetherspoon pub on a cold, wet January evening. But it’s in quick service restaurants (QSRs) where the LTO action is really taking hold.
McDonald’s seems to have gone into overdrive recently, with a new “secret menu” among its activity. This involved, in January alone, the return of the Chicken Big Mac, along with The Big Arch, Fajita Chicken One, chili cheese bites, Galaxy Smooth caramel McFlurry and the surf n’ turf.
Such activity contributed to LTO use across hospitality growing by 5% in 2025, and they now account for 6% of average fast-food menus, according to Meaningful Vision. It also found 44% of LTO items cost less than £5, which represents a 12% drop in the average price on the previous year.
While they pull people into venues these metrics – against an inflationary backdrop – LTOs might not be the greatest thing for margins. They are also a massive contributor to complexity in QSRs, both with the front-end service and the back-end kitchen processes. They also impact the supply chain and boost the potential for waste, with extended menu items requiring many more ingredients.
These are more than enough reasons why LTOs have not been universally embraced by the industry. There are noticeable holdouts. Five Guys had kept the same menu in the UK since it opened its first unit here in 2013 until the recent addition of a single new item – loaded fries. Dave’s Hot Chicken is also pretty concise and has not deviated much from the core, while the California-based In-N-Out Burger is notably famed for its concise and unchanging menu.
Another such operator with an LTO-free record is coming to these shores later this year – Raising Cane’s – with a London outpost in the pipeline. It prides itself on having a mere five-item menu comprising chicken fingers, crinkle fries, coleslaw, Texas toast and a single dipping sauce. The last new item to hit the menu was lemonade, in 2007.
This has created an incredibly simple and efficient supply chain that helps it keep costs down among other upsides. This straightforward model also provides it with the ability to serve customers in-store at great pace and helps bring a freshness to the offering as the chicken often moves from the fryer to a customer’s plate in a mere 30 seconds. Nothing sits around under heating lamps in its restaurants.
The removal of customer indecision at the counter further fuels the throughput of diners and order volumes. It has been calculated that a car moves through a Raising Cane’s drive-thru in only 2.5 minutes, which is 40% faster than McDonald’s and three-times that experienced at KFC.
The dichotomy for the QSR industry is that the ideal scenario would be to run with a simple, efficiently concise menu – but there is a need to keep injecting newness via LTOs to tempt customers in store and bump up that essential frequency metric.
Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider
This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.