With dramatically fewer restaurant visits by law or by choice, Toppers Pizza saw a lot more people looking for interesting flavors and limited time offers like prime rib or spicy Nashville hot chicken pizzas.
“Compared to pre COVID, we’ve seen somewhere in the five to seven percent of our overall orders shifting to specialty pizzas.
The brand has a pretty regular cadence of LTOs with specialty items and a higher price tag.
“You’re either forced to waste product or forced to discount that premium product which usually doesn’t work so well in the business model,” said Malchow.
It starts with trendspotting, Malchow said he keeps a close eye on not the delivery pizza competition, but independent, chef-driven restaurants “that’s where the flavors are created,” he said.
We had done some research on what some trending flavors and toppings were and we put them into a large screener customer survey and asked all of these ideas, which appeal to you most? What would you like to try or tell friend about?” said Malchow.
We’ve really leveraged those platforms to launch these new recipes, those platforms provide a more dynamic and inclusive way of launching any product whether its premium or just a new product line.
All of those tweets, Facebook messages and Instagram comments can get overwhelming, but he said that’s the most important part of the process.