BK & Hershey Desserts: Delivering on a Sweet Opportunity

Desserts are becoming an increasingly important part of food-service menus. With innovations in flavor combinations and formats, consumers have more options to satisfy their sweet tooths. Hershey Foodservice helps operators make menu items irresistible with premium-quality ingredients.

With the rise of takeout and delivery over the last year, it’s important to leverage the power of impulse sales from desserts on your menu to ensure you’re not losing out on valuable dollars.

Some remarkable stats Hershey uncovered in its recent study of takeout and delivery are as follows:

• Across 10 leading national quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains, the growth of digital orders that include dessert is outpacing total digital order growth by 47%.

• Desserts boost average digital check orders by $6.

• And, desserts add a 29% lift to digital orders! 2

Operators who market desserts as an add-on, along with the possibility of bundling items, can also gain a step on their competitors. In fact, 60% of all consumers are likely to order dessert as an add-on, and 75% of millennials are likely to order dessert as an add-on1.

Portable desserts also lead to snacking occasions, and consumers enjoy desserts as a special treat. Take, for instance, this statistic from Technomic: Almost half of consumers order desserts for pickup or delivery because they want to treat themselves1.

It’s interesting to note that 61% of off-premise dessert orders are purchased for dinner, and 60% are ordered for lunch or an afternoon snack. Additionally, 56% of consumers order desserts for pickup or delivery because they have a craving for something sweet1. There are so many opportunities to deliver on all the different need states for consumers seeking desserts!

Beverages also play a large role. For today’s younger consumer – the heaviest food-service users –beverage offerings are more likely to be a destination driver3. And consumers increasingly include beverages in their snack definitions (59%)4. They are versatile, portable and can be positioned to fit a variety of snack or meal replacement needs. Milkshakes are the perfect menu item to capture opportunistic sales from those consumers looking for a snack that fulfills the desire to take a break or treat themselves.

Bottom line? Desserts help drive overall sales, impulse sales and repeat traffic and create loyal consumers. Realizing the full potential of desserts on your menu, especially with the renewed focus on to-go and delivery, equates to incremental sales and repeat purchases for you!

Research

Check out http://hersheyfoodserviceinsights.com/deliveryandtakeout.html for more insights.

Sources:

1 Hershey Proprietary Research on Dessert Delivery and Takeout, Technomic Inc., 2021

2 Hershey Proprietary Research on Dessert Delivery and Takeout, Edison Trends, 2021

3 Beverage Consumer Trend Report, Technomic Inc., 2020

4 Snacking Occasion Consumer Trend Report, Technomic Inc., 2020

The Hershey Co. is a Sapphire partner member of the National Franchisee Association. The company may be reached at 630-724-7124 or www.thehersheycompany.com/foodservice.