Rotate Flavors to Grow Sales
Flavor rotation is one of the most important ways to boost slush sales in your store. It keeps the category fresh and interesting and adds some excitement as new flavors are brought into the store.
Frazil has conducted a survey of over 5,000 convenience stores and found that the more stores rotate flavors the better the sales performance of the store for slush.
So what does the data tell us about the benefits of flavor rotation?
If we look at non-flavor rotating stores we get the “baseline” performance for the category with No flavor rotation. This means that the number of bowls in the store, and the number of flavors offered through the store are the same for the whole year.
For stores that had one extra flavor rotated through the store in excess of the number of bowls in the store, we see a 17% performance difference for those stores vs. the non-rotating baseline. For stores with 2 extra rotational flavors in the store we see that sales for those stores were 28% above the non-rotating baseline! And for 3 extra flavors and 4 extra flavors we see that the sales performance difference is an additional 45% and 51% above the baseline.
These results show how impactful flavor rotation can be on sales performance for a store!
Frazil recommends planning an annual flavor rotation schedule, depending on if you have one, two, or three machines in your store.
For single machine (two bowl) configurations we recommend keeping one bowl as a constant flavor and having the other bowl as the “rotational” bowl that you use to alternate flavors. For Frazil customers we recommend that the left bowl ALWAYS carry Tiger’s Blood. That flavor is Frazil’s number one performing flavor nation-wide and will maximize your sales. Then you can set a flavor rotation schedule for the other bowl that changes at least every two months.
Every year Frazil launches two new homerun Limited time offer flavors. We recommend that those flavors are rotated in during the summer months, with the first flavor offered May and June, and the second flavor offered July and August.
For two machine, four bowl configuration stores we recommend that the store keeps three flavors constant and keeps the fourth bowl as the rotational bowl.
Many slush programs have flavor stickers plastered to the front of their bowls. Not only does this not look good, but it also makes it very hard and cumbersome to switch flavors. This makes it nearly impossible for those stores to realize the benefits of flavor rotation. One of the benefits of the Frazil program is that we make flavor rotation EASY with our flavor tags. Every case of product comes with a fresh flavor tag to be placed or swapped out in the flavor tag holder on the top of the machine. This helps draw attention to the new flavor, and makes changing out a flavor as easy as rinsing out the bowl, pouring the new product into the bowl, and swapping out the flavor tag.
Also, many of our new LTO flavor tags have a “New Flavor” callout sticker included on them in the case to help draw attention to it and to get consumers excited about the arrival of a new, awesome flavor.
So, get your flavor rotation schedule ready, check out the new flavors for this year’s LTO options, and get ready to dazzle consumers with your amazing Frazil program!