A nine-week holiday menu at BIGGBY® COFFEE is less about seasonal flavor novelty and more about engineering repeat visit occasions — something the 470-plus-unit Michigan-based franchise has built deliberately into its promotional calendar this year.
Running November 2 through January 4, the holiday lineup anchors on peppermint (Peppermint Stick Mocha, Snow Mint Mocha), sugar cookie, and cranberry-raspberry SKUs, but the structural story is in the weekly and event-based promotions layered on top. That architecture is increasingly common among regional coffee franchises competing against national chains with deeper media budgets.
The Frequency Play
The clearest operator-intelligence signal here is the "More the Merri-Mint Mondays" mechanic: every Monday through January 4, a guest who purchases a peppermint latte receives $1 off a Bragel® or Maple Waffle Sandwich. That is a textbook food-attachment driver — using a low-friction beverage discount to pull food ticket attachment upward on the slowest day of a typical café week. For multi-unit operators benchmarking their own LTO strategy, this is worth noting: the discount is conditional, not unconditional, which protects margin while still creating behavioral incentive.
Beyond Mondays, BIGGBY® stacks four discrete event-day promotions — Veterans Day (free 16-oz. brewed coffee for military), Thanksgiving (BOGO 20- or 24-oz. specialty beverage at participating locations), Black Friday (free 16-oz. black coffee with food purchase in the first 60 minutes after open), and Christmas Eve (BOGO or $1 off specialty beverages). Each is designed to intercept a high-foot-traffic moment when competitors are either closed or understaffed.
What This Signals for Operators
For foodservice operators and franchise groups evaluating their own seasonal promotion calendars, BIGGBY®'s approach reflects a few converging trends. First, regional coffee chains are increasingly sophisticated about day-part and day-of-week layering rather than relying on a single seasonal hero item to carry the quarter. Second, food attachment — not beverage upsell — is emerging as the primary lever for average-check growth in the QSR coffee segment, as labor costs make ticket efficiency more critical than throughput volume alone.
The gift card push (physical and digital) is also worth flagging for operators thinking about holiday revenue diversification. At a 470-unit footprint spanning 13 states, even modest gift card penetration per location represents meaningful deferred revenue that flows into Q1 — a structurally quieter period for most coffee franchises.
For vendors and agencies working the regional franchise segment, BIGGBY®'s seasonal playbook illustrates how a fully franchised system without a corporate marketing fund as large as a Starbucks or Dutch Bros can still generate consistent promotional cadence through structured LTO architecture rather than media-weight dominance. That is a procurement and agency briefing worth internalizing before Q4 planning conversations.
Operators looking to benchmark their own holiday LTO performance against regional coffee peer data should review our beverage trend analysis in Operator Intelligence and our coverage of QSR food-attachment strategy in the Growth Department.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
