Dive Brief:
- El Pollo Loco added three chicken burritos with guacamole to its menu at a $9.99 price point that varies by location, the company announced Thursday.
- The three burritos were designed based on consumer feedback, El Pollo Loco’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jill Adams, said. Consumers wanted larger, more flavorful burritos at a price point that maintained relative value.
- The inclusion of guacamole for no added cost stands in contrast to the strategy of Mexican fast casual giant Chipotle, which charges extra — about $2.90 at one Los Angeles location — for the avocado-based addition.
Dive Insight:
The menu additions are part of an ongoing effort to build greater value into the brand’s menu. El Pollo Loco’s CEO, Elizabeth Williams, foreshadowed the rollout of the burritos on the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call in May.
“In the sub-$10 price range, we've got to figure out how to continue to innovate there. And that's exactly what we're doing with our Burrito platform as an example,” Williams said on the call.
At the time, Williams said, the brand was testing twists on its burrito platform at a number of different different price points; she did not share specific details on the performance of those tests. The upper end of El Pollo Loco’s menu, Williams said, still needs to offer competitive value.
How much value the additions provide per dollar spent is an open question. The new burritos range in caloric content from 790 calories for the queso burrito up to 1020 calories for the chipotle chicken version, according to the brand’s online ordering platform. At one location where those burritos were available at the $9.99 value price point mentioned in the press release, the chain’s standard 480 calorie chicken burrito was $4.99, or 96 calories per dollar. The guacamole burritos range from 79 to 102 calories per dollar.
While calories per dollar is an imperfect index for the amount of food a guest gets, it can serve a rough measure for the relative nutritional value of a meal.
Menu additions and value meals are two of the key ways QSR brands are competing to lure customers in 2024. El Pollo Loco competitor Del Taco, for example, recently launched a value menu with about 15 items costing less than $2. Taco Bell added a suite of items to its value menu for a limited time earlier this year. El Pollo Loco’s traffic at company-owned stores has been positive this year, increasing 1.2% in Q1, according to its earnings release.
