Pizza Hut debuted Monday a new “$5 Flavor Menu” aimed at providing customers with more value options in the new year, the company told Nation’s Restaurant News last week.
“Five dollars in the food category has been a magic price point,” Jeff Fox, chief brand and concept officer for Plano, Texas-based Pizza Hut, said in an interview. “It’s easy for consumers to understand.”
The $5 Flavor Menu features a choice of a medium one-topping pizza, eight boneless WingStreet wings, a chocolate chip cookie or triple chocolate brownie, Tuscani Pasta, a double order of breadsticks or flavor sticks, and four 20-ounce beverages for $5 each when ordering two or more items.
“You can order any of these items for $5 each, so long as you order two,” Fox said. “You can get wings and a cookie. You can get pasta and a pizza. You can get all four of those things.”
Fox added that the $5 increment is easy for consumers to understand. “It’s easily accessible for our consumers and providing a great value,” he said.
The $5 menu follows on the heels of several popular Pizza Hut value promotions in 2015. At mid-year, the company added a $6.99 “any pairs” deal that included any two medium pizzas — specialties or create-your-own — for $6.99 each.
In November and December, Pizza Hut offered a Triple Treat Box for $19.99, which included two medium one-topping pizzas, breadsticks and a large chocolate chip cookie cut in eight slices.
The $5 Flavor Menu will continue those value messages, Fox said.
“Value is always important in the food category,” he said. “And Pizza Hut has always been known for having great-tasting food, but we want to make sure we are known also for having great value.”
Pizza Hut has no timeframe for how long the Flavor Menu will run, and it is planning to use television, digital, social and other media to promote it, Fox said.
Pizza Hut is also adding a unique position for the menu on its website, with a special tab in the upper right-hand corner to make access simpler for customers.
Doug Terfehr, spokesman for Pizza Hut, said, “You can enter the $5 Flavor Menu as soon as you get to our homepage. It’s a quick click from a user perspective for a faster, easier way to access that.” The company said nearly half of all orders are now received via the web or mobile device.
Fox said this $5 menu is aimed at enhancing Pizza Hut’s value positioning in the year ahead.
“What we want to make sure of, going into 2016 and beyond, is that consumers also see us highly competitive on price and make that price easy to access,” he said. “For us, the $5 Flavor Menu combines all of that. It’s our great-tasting pizzas, the totality of our menu and it’s a great price point. We want to it be incredibly simple for everyone to say ‘yes.’”
Pizza Hut is a subsidiary of Louisville, Ky.-based Yum! Brands Inc., and has 15,600 restaurants in 97 countries.
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