How Coffee Chains Design, Market, And Analyze Their Seasonal Limited-Time Offers – CoffeeTalk

Peet’s Coffee offers caffeinated mocktails designed with winter flavors, such as the Derby, Bestie, Tiger’s Eye, and Candy Cane. Dutch Bros also offers time-limited drinks like Candy Cane and Hazelnut Truffle Mochas, and a blue raspberry sweet cream version of its Rebel energy drink. The evocative power of seasonal coffee drinks depends on a careful process of development, refinement, and analysis. Before consumers taste orange puree or peppermint syrup, these ingredients have to be designed, tested, produced, and distributed.

Companies like Dutch Bros, Peet’s, and Westrock Coffee begin planning and testing their seasonal drinks far in advance. The development process for coffee LTOs can begin as far as two years in advance, starting with conversations about flavor priorities, LTO cadences, and approaches to menu innovation with Westrock’s customers. The final product of flavors and drink builds is locked in as much as a year in advance of when they are actually going to launch, leaving brands time to test and market their drinks.

Dutch Bros keeps an eye on trends in flavors and uses various tools to keep track of emerging ones. From conceiving of an LTO drink to deploying it typically takes around six months for Dutch Bros. Peet’s also monitors flavor trends and tries to capitalize on them with its seasonal LTOs. The brand gives its product teams about an eight-month lead time to develop drinks, this year, which meant making Mocktails.

Innovating in menu development is crucial for companies like Dutch Bros, Peet’s, and Westrock Coffee to create a memorable experience for customers during the holiday season.

Peet’s holiday coffee LTOs aim to expand the range of dayparts and occasions for its drinks, catering to growing consumer appetites for caffeinated drinks throughout the day. The brand focuses on creating unique flavors that cater to different times of the day, afternoon thoughts, and moments of need. Orange bitters and blood orange puree are the centerpieces of two of Peet’s holiday drinks, taking advantage of citrus’ associations with the holiday season. The Tiger’s Eye sparkling drink is designed to capture consumer demand for refreshers, while the Bestie supplements fruit flavors with chai, a blend of warm, aromatic spices.

Identifying trends and dayparts is only one part of the battle; the flavors in complex beverages must work well together, a process which depends on the density of ingredients. Most beverages are subject to complex chemical processes that impact flavor, and this requires different formulae: packaged goods need to be shelf-stable for a period, while drinks prepared on-site need to maintain a consistently appealing texture and flavor for consumers.

Once Westrock has locked-in the basics of a flavor or set of flavors, the company enlists panels of supertasters who specialize in analyzing caffeinated drinks and can detect everything from over-roasted coffee to unpleasant, lagging creaminess. Further refinement follows before blind taste tests with general consumers. Once the company has settled on a flavor combination, it has to make sure the recipe can be produced at scale, which requires understanding how liquids behave as they move through the production process, given the scale of some factories.

Designing modular drinks is easier at Dutch Bros, as flavors that work in one part of a menu category tend to work across several drinks. Syrups or additives that go with one coffee-based drink generally go well with others, while flavors from energy drinks and refreshers tend to be interchangeable across those platforms. Dutch Bros often tests its new drinks in shops to ensure consumers like the beverages and that the production process fits in with existing cafe workflows.

Operations are a key consideration for Peet’s, and the brand tries to strike a balance between flavor innovation and simplicity and familiarity for its workers. For simple changes, such as moving from Pumpkin Spice to Holiday Lattes, those changes are minimal. To support training, the brand distributes recipe cards to stores and provides training videos for more complicated new drinks.

Peet’s fruity coffee mocktails require more marketing muscle to alert consumers than other time-limited drinks. The brand works through multiple channels, including PR and earned media, with a special focus on consumer engagement and through its app. Peet’s most important marketing channel for new beverages might be its frontline workers, who are considered the biggest ambassadors.

Westrock tries to finalize its drinks as much as a year in advance to give clients the time to do all the photo shoots, marketing, and consumer testing that they need to do. Actual production begins about three months before product launch. Dutch Bros has a strong presence on social media, making it easy for the brand to roll out new menu items and LTOs.

Measuring the success of LTOs is easy to determine at Westrock. Absolute velocity, units per shop, per week or per day, and the percent of loyalty guests that try an LTO are good indicators of appeal. Dutch Bros’ protein coffee, launched last January, was a breakthrough item due to its nutritional profile.

At Westrock, success is also easy to determine. If customers want more or if Westrock needs to expand production, the company knows it has a good drink on its hands. The biggest indicator is if they keep ordering. Once Westrock knows it has a hit, it’s often easy to plan for the future.

Peet’s analyzes raw sales, but also looks at qualitative feedback and brand buzz, since total sales may not measure a drink’s deeper connection with specific consumers. A Peet’s spokesperson wrote that a success is considered if it leaves a lasting impression and connects with the target audience as intended.

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