Limited-time offerings can fuel urgency

Time is running out! Buy now before it’s too late! Don’t miss your chance!

It’s a cold hard fact that scarcity sells. Companies like eBay and StubHub are valued in the billions because of it. We get excited every time the McRib comes back and there’s mayhem when Pumpkin Spice Latte season returns. Fortunately for you, it’s also useful to independent pizzerias. A limited time offering, or LTO, can provide the power to do more than just boost sales. By tapping into the customers’ fear of missing out you can increase sales, attract media attention, and strengthen your community relations.

Seasonality

Every summer, pizza fans flock to Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana’s sixteen locations for a taste of their fresh tomato pizza. This is a pizza that’s only available while tomatoes are in season, unlike the restaurant’s perennial pies that use canned tomatoes. Sales surge as customers grab what they can before time runs out. When summer ends, so does the fresh tomato pizza.

The rhythm of seasonality keeps Dan Richer engaged with both his customers and local farmers through his ever-changing menu at Razza in Jersey City. “Customers want to know when corn is coming back and when zucchini will be on the menu again. The truth is that I don’t know! What we’re doing is alive.” Richer bases his entire concept on perpetual change. He reprints menus every day so he can adjust to the limits of nature. There are some pizzas that will always be available, but the ability to constantly add items based on seasonality gives Razza fans a reason to come back more often.

Collaboration

What’s better than marketing to your own customers? Marketing to someone else’s customers! You can use LTOs to do both by offering a limited-time collaboration with another local business. Greenville Avenue Pizza Company in Dallas teamed up with a popular Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood to create a hit. “They told us their number one seller was the Dan Dan Sausage, so we took inspiration from that dish to create a super popular pizza that lived on our menu for just a few weeks,” says owner Sammy Mandell.

Alex Coons has had great success collaborating with like-minded businesses through his restaurant Hot Tongue in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles. “We recently ran a collaborative pie for just one weekend with a fantastic local restaurant called BeeWali’s. The collaboration proved to be a fantastic marketing tool for both of us, drawing in lots of new faces. It was one of our best weekends of the year.” Collaborations like this don’t just build a restaurant’s audience, they also strengthen communities.

Publicity

The main reason Greenville Avenue Pizza Company runs limited-time offerings is to stay relevant. “Our focus is on staying top of mind,” says Mandell. “How do you get yourself press coverage if you’re doing the same thing every day?” By having a rolling series of LTOs, Greenville Avenue Pizza Company has established a reputation within their community. It’s so much a part of their identity that the largest local magazine in Dallas recently featured them on the cover of their pizza-centric issue. Even better, the magazine asked GAPCO to collaborate on a special pizza in celebration of the issue. It doesn’t get any better than collaborating with the press!

On the social media side, an LTO provides loads of content opportunities. Images and videos of your new creation will generate buzz and provide a nice break from the same photo of your pepperoni pizza. MaiPai Tiki Bar in Hamilton, Ontario uses Instagram Reels to announce a new featured pizza every week. These videos rack up thousands of views and lead to a spike in pre-orders. MaiPai once ran a social media campaign that invited their followers to vote for their favorite weekly feature. They scored lots of engagement and used the results to update their regular menu.

Boosting Slow Periods

Time-sensitive offers have the ability to bring people through the door in times of need. Mama’s Too in New York City creates a new sandwich every week to be sold only on Wednesday. Regulars who usually come in for pizza make an extra visit on Wednesday just to pick up the weekly sandwich. The pizzeria announces the sandwich one day in advance via Instagram and they regularly sell out.

Diana Huynh, owner of Cici’s Pizza & Wings in Toronto, fired up an LTO when she noticed her merch line wasn’t selling. Last October, she celebrated Pizza Month with a special offer of a free slice with the purchase of any piece of Cici’s swag. She usually sells just five pieces of merch per month, but the free slice incentive increased that number to over forty.

Challenges

Creating temporary menu items takes a lot of work. You’ll have to devote time to R&D, especially if you’re working with an unfamiliar ingredient or process. Seasonal items pose a particular challenge because a short season won’t give you much time to experiment.

Before you can take your new item public, you’ll have to train your staff. The kitchen has to know how to prepare the dish and your servers need to be able to sell it. A complicated process that clogs up your makeline will give you more headaches than solutions. This is another reason it’s great to collaborate with another restaurant that can handle some of the prep for you.

One of the most popular LTOs at Greenville Avenue Pizza Company is their Pretty Pickle pizza. “We get more requests for this than any other pie,” says owner Sammy Mandell. “We would have already added it to the regular menu, but each pie gets 100 slices of pickle and that’s just too labor-intensive for my staff.”

Dan Richer agrees. “I can spend months perfecting chocolate cake but if it’s not a process my staff can execute perfectly every time it’s not worth adding to the menu.

The loudest refrain from pizzerias that use limited time offerings is that they have to become part of your routine. Greenville Avenue Pizza Company spent two years building their LTO program but now it’s an essential part of their restaurant. Razza and MaiPai consider short-run items to be part of their DNA. They’ve trained customers to anticipate LTOs as a way of holding their attention. It’s important to put in the work of establishing consistency, otherwise the occasional one-off will go unnoticed. It takes time and energy to build a rhythm, but the results could pump a new lifesource into your pizzeria.

SCOTT WIENER is the founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours in New York City and SliceOutHunger.org  Instagram: @scottspizzatours