Freebirds World Burrito is raising the bar with its annual promotions thanks to a new pricing strategy.
Partnering with SignalFlare.ai, a decision intelligence platform for restaurants, the chain’s annual Texas Style Brisket promotion surpassed last year’s demand by 20 percent.
CEO Alex Eagle credited the partnership with the pricing company for the financial gains.
“Our first price initiative last year using the SignalFlare.ai platform captured over 90 percent of the expected increase, a vast improvement from the 50- 60 percent expected. Our latest initiative over-indexed due to a blend of strategic price actions and a well-timed premium limited-time offer (LTO),” said Eagle.
Freebirds check average rose from $20.66 before the promotion to $21.52 afterwards, resulting in a 4.2 percent increase. This included a 2.4 percent gain from a modest price adjustment—120 percent more than projected—and an additional 1.8 percent from the premium LTO.
Eagle noted that before partnering with SignalFlare.ai the chain struggled with effective pricing impacts.
“Their holistic approach factors in the real buying power of our guests, our guest experience metrics, and robust econometrics. SignalFlare has been a contributing factor in helping us achieve higher flow-thru on necessary price increases.”
Pricing remains top of mind for restaurants, amid rising chain supply, operational and labor costs. As well as the “value wars” playing out in quick service restaurants, coupled with consumer sensitivity.
To aid in this, SignalFlare uses a modern guest-centric methodology and is hyper-focused on improving the first and last mile of price recommendations for clients.
CEO Mike Lukianoff said, “We’ve dramatically improved the first mile of data extraction, transformation and load through direct integration with Qu (Freebirds point of sale) and our partner, Snowflake. The next goal is to automate the last mile of executing a price change in the POS directly. We are excited about what the Qu platform can unlock for our mutual clients.”
