By Steve Clough, Hungry Howie’s

Many of the biggest names in QSR are leaning into headline-making promotions right now.

Five-dollar meal deals. Buy-one-get-one offers. Flash discounts that move traffic fast and disappear just as fast once the offer ends.

I’ve spent years on the development side of QSR, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion. The strongest value stories aren’t manufactured through discounts. They’re built into the operating model that supports the price in the first place.

That difference is easy to miss in a strong year. It becomes unmistakable once costs climb, traffic softens, and franchisees need the model to carry more of the weight. Value that’s designed into a business protects margin, simplifies operations, and gives a franchisee room to compete. Value bolted on through a promotion is usually a temporary answer to a permanent question, and eventually the bill comes due, usually to the franchisee.

Real Estate, Menu, and Everything Between

The gap between those two comes down to order of operations. Most brands build their real estate footprint, kitchen, staffing model, and supply chain around what’s standard for the category, and turn to marketing to find value to offer afterward. I think that’s backwards. If a brand wants to compete on price without bleeding margin, those decisions must happen before a single item gets priced. That means how much space to lease, understanding kitchen complexity, and knowing the number of vendors that need to be involved.

Hungry Howie’s is a useful example, mainly because the model was built this way from day one instead of being retrofitted later. The delivery-and-carryout format keeps the footprint lighter than a full dine-in build, and it keeps staffing simpler too, since there’s no dining room to run. That’s a structural decision that was made well before price wars took over the category, and it’s a meaningful part of why the brand has room to compete on price without always needing a promotion to do it.

The same logic plays out on the menu. Adding a new item generally goes one of two ways. Either it runs through the kitchen, supply chain, and staffing already in place, or it requires something new, like a vendor, a piece of equipment, or extra preparation, that eventually turns into a cost somebody has to absorb. That discipline carries into how Hungry Howie’s approaches new items and limited-time offers.

Rather than building a promotion from scratch to manufacture a few weeks of excitement, new menu moments tend to draw on what’s already authentic to the brand – things like its Flavored Crust^® legacy or bringing back a nostalgic fan favorite, so they still run through the kitchen, supply chain, and staffing already in place.

This is the part that matters most for franchisees, and it’s also the part that discount-driven value can’t really offer – pricing power that survives as the menu gets bigger. When a new item runs through the kitchen and supply chain a system already has, it protects the margin a franchisee is counting on. When it requires a workaround, that cost usually shows up later as a fee, an upcharge, or added labor. Multiply that across ten menu additions, and the difference compounds for any franchise. Under one model, a franchisee’s unit economics hold up, and sometimes even improve. Under the other, they likely don’t.

Why This Discipline Matters More Right Now

The current operating environment makes this discipline matter even more. Restaurant365’s 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry research shows net margins staying compressed even as food and labor costs have climbed sharply since 2019. Every promotion must get funded from somewhere, and in a franchise system, that pressure usually works its way back to the operator. Technomic’s Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report points to a similar pattern at the industry level, with overall chain sales growth slowing for four straight years even as more brands lean on short-term discounting to hold onto traffic. In an environment like that, a heavy promotional calendar gets harder to sustain unless the business was already built to support everyday value instead of manufacturing it.

The Questions That Tell You the Truth

None of this requires a brand’s financial statements to evaluate. A few questions tend to surface it quickly, whether you’re a franchise development team looking hard at your own model or a prospective franchisee doing the same on someone else’s.

• How does the space compare to average unit volume? A smaller footprint doing comparable sales is generating more revenue per dollar of rent.
• How many SKUs does the kitchen run, and how long does it take a new hire to perfect them? Complexity that looks impressive on a menu board tends to show up later as turnover and inconsistent execution.
• When something new gets added, does it require a vendor or new equipment, or does it run through what’s already in place?
• Could this brand’s value proposition survive a quarter without promotions? If the honest answer is no, the value was never structural to begin with.
• For a prospective franchisee, does the brand’s value come from the system, or from whatever happens to be on the promotional calendar that month?

That’s the test worth applying to any concept. Value that must be discounted into existence isn’t really value. Value that’s built into the business from the start doesn’t need the discount, and it doesn’t disappear when promotions go quiet.

Steve Clough is the vice president of franchise development for Hungry Howie’s. For more information about IFA franchisor member Hungry Howie’s, please visit franchise.org/franchise-opportunities/hungry-howies-pizza/.