By: Ireland Lee & Sabrina Huda Sanchez

Limited Time Offers, or LTOs, are a great way to build on excitement of seasonal trends and special holidays. Simply put, LTOs leverage the idea of scarcity or unique menu items to drive sales. While there are many reasons why LTOs are a good idea, the prospect of additional sales alone should be enough to convince a food service operator to run some.
Holidays such as Valentine’s Day are an opportune time to get creative, jazz up your menu, and run promotions. If you are concerned about the cost or effort of establishing a love-themed limited time offered menu item, it’s actually not as difficult as you might think.
All you need to do is spruce up a few existing menu items to create something customers are willing to snap a photo of and share on social media. This is a list of some surefire ways to bring a little zing to your establishment for Valentine’s Day!

Sprinkles, Sweethearts & Other Various Toppings

Monster milkshakes have risen to the top of popularity in the past couple of years. This is a basic milkshake flavor that is stacked with over-the-top add ons. The idea is to make your presentation as loud and Instagram-worthy as possible. If you have milkshakes on your menu, consider decorating the cup with a rim of candy, adding a mountain of whipped cream, and sprinkling a few Valentine’s Day themed toppings like these:

  1. Conversation Hearts

Conversation hearts are another great social media opportunity as it can strike up a conversation. They can be bought at a low cost wholesale or you can take it a step further to get custom made hearts with your store name printed on them!

  2. Red, white, and pink M&M’s

The Mars Company makes it easy with their seasonal M&M color packs. This act is genius for celebrations, such as Valentine's Day and weddings, means a simple add on to your drinks or desserts.

  3. Sprinkles

A sure-fire option is sprinkles. Sprinkles come in an almost endless selection; this includes a variety of shapes, colors, and clarity. A way to cut back on continuously buying different ones, as that can be costly, is to buy individual colors so that you can mix and match versus buying themed packs. By that, we mean using red and green during Christmas time, but then you can use that red during Valentine’s Day and the green for St Patrick's Day.

  4. Chocolate Chips

February is the month of chocolate so why not top a drink with chocolate chips and call it something Valentine? Ghirardelli makes an excellent option that you can special order from LollicupStore.

  5. Chocolate Décor

Create your own chocolate toppers! On a parchment sheet, take melted chocolate and pipe little shapes onto it. After that, place in the fridge for a few minutes, or until it is hard enough to stay together on its own. Place those atop a cloud of whipped cream and you’ve made an LTO.

  6. Cereal

Either regular cereal or special edition cereal. Think Lucky Charm marshmallows – it adds some pizzazz and childhood nostalgia, unless of course your customer is a child then you’ve hit a pot of gold.

Food Coloring

Easily change the color of a drink or food item with food coloring to match it with the holiday or season. Valentine’s Day is a perfect opportunity to add that red food coloring to the vanilla frappe that’s on your menu.

Rename

This is probably the easiest option as it consists of you taking an item already on your menu and changing the name according to the holiday or season. Since it’s so close to Valentine’s Day, an example would be taking a strawberry shake and naming it something along the lines of “Sweetheart Milkshake.” Get your chalkboard and creative skills out for the simplest way to update your specials board!

Photo Op

  1. Decorate the store.

This can include a mural or wall piece that you have year-round for your customers to snap a selfie with their order. For example, a neon sign of your brand surrounded by seasonal decorations.
Another option would be to setup a photo booth. Supplies are inexpensive at discount stores and you’re only limited by your creativity! These can easily be put up and taken down to rotate through holidays.
In the age of social media, photo ops mean everything for establishments. It shows off your product to a demographic you might not otherwise reach. The customers will return and tell their friends about it, an easy way for word-of-mouth marketing.

  2. Dress up the storefront.

An aesthetic storefront encourages user generated publicity. Set up a backdrop or staged area to take a picture of the item on a table. This is often done by content creators and influencers with lattes. LalaLand, Hola Café, and various mom and pop establishments do this best.

New Twist to An Old Favorite

Do you have a fan favorite in your store? Is there a way to take that favorite and “spice it up” someway? Perhaps you could even combine the flavors of more than one favorite. For example, if your top selling drink is a chocolate milkshake, and your fourth best-selling is a peanut butter milkshake, you can combine the two flavors to create a peanut butter cup topped with seasonal sprinkles and you have a quick LTO with no additional cost.

Special Deals

LTOs also include sales and promotions. Without needing to create a new menu item, offer a buy one, get one (BOGO) deal and design the promotion flyer to the theme of the holiday. For instance, any discount on buying two or more items can be marketed as a “Valentine’s Day sweetheart special,” meaning one for you and one for your sweetheart.
As long as the marketing ties in, you can run any type of promotion (Memorial Day Sale, 4th of July deal, Christmas Special, etc).

Takeaway

LTOs can drive excitement from regular customers to come back and can encourage new customers to try your store. For small businesses, you don’t need a full R&D team developing a new menu item. Just a few tweaks to existing food and drinks or even a properly marketed promotion, can give you the edge any holiday.