Give Potato Corner Their Flowers
A brand person’s appreciation of how Potato Corner keeps the menu interesting, what McDonald’s gets right about scarcity, and why Jollibee keeps frustrating its own customers
Potato Corner just launched fries with soft serve. Limited stores only, but it’s there. And it reminded me that they’ve been quietly doing something most fast food brands struggle with: they keep things interesting.
Last year, ketchup fries. They weren’t great. I’m being honest. But they made me buy them anyway. The product didn’t have to land for me to want to try it. The fact that it existed at all was enough.
Then there was 2023, when their sister company Shakey’s came out with mojos in Potato Corner flavoring. Not a Potato Corner release, but it counts. On the backend, super simple. Just a flavor crossover between two brands in the same family. For the consumer, it was golden. I never bought them. Shakey’s mojos are overpriced. But I noticed, and I wanted to.
So here’s what I keep thinking about. Potato Corner is a small-menu brand. That’s the whole proposition. Fries, flavors, done. There’s a real risk that if they keep stacking new things on top, the magic goes away. The simplicity is what makes the experience work for the customer, and I’d guess it’s what makes the operations work for the franchisees too. In fast food, the backend matters a lot. You want to innovate, but you need to keep things simple enough to get things out fast. Price and margin sit at number one, always.
Maybe this whole push is coming from franchisees asking for more SKUs to lift revenue. Fair ask. The answer might be more of exactly what Potato Corner is already doing: occasional, playful additions that come and go.
Which brings me to McDonald’s, who has figured out the seasonal play better than anyone in this market. Every single time twister fries come back, I have to buy them at least twice. Once to have them again. And at least one more time to have them before they leave. They’ve tried this with other items, mostly during Lent, but the Twister is the one that pulls the trigger every time. The thing that makes it work is that the scarcity is built into the relationship. You know the rules. You know they’ll come back, and you know they’ll go away again. So you eat them while you can.
Then there’s Jollibee, who somehow does the opposite. Items appear and disappear and people get mad about it. Honey beef rice, beef pepper rice. These things show up, build a small following, and then vanish without warning. And the biggest biggest mystery to me: they occasionally kill off the Champ. The Champ. A mainstay. Something they actively feature in their stores. Even the Champ is not safe! I used to think this was operational, like the burger takes too long to push out, so they pull it during certain windows. But at the time of this writing, the Champ is gone and the Aloha Champ is on the menu. So that theory falls apart. My guess now is they’re trying to push people toward the Double Yums, the double-patty version. There’s no marketing push behind those either. Anyway, it’s frustrating.
Look at the three of them side by side and the difference is clear. Potato Corner uses novelty as a treat, layered carefully on top of a simple core. McDonald’s uses scarcity as a ritual, where customers know the cycle and play along. Jollibee uses scarcity on the wrong things, taking away what customers had decided was permanent.
That’s the real thing sitting in all this. The customer has a relationship with your menu, and they decide what’s a treat and what’s an anchor. Take a treat away, they’ll miss it and come back when it returns. Touch an anchor, they’ll feel betrayed.
Potato Corner is playing the treat card well. The new releases come across as little gifts, not as a redesign of what they are. The fries are still the thing. The fries are always the thing. So when they drop ketchup fries that turn out to be mediocre, or fries with soft serve you can only get at a few branches, the customer’s relationship with the brand stays where it is, and maybe even gets a little stronger. They notice that the brand is still paying attention.
Give them their flowers. The simplicity is the whole point of Potato Corner, and the releases work because they don’t get in the way of that. The customer still knows what they’re walking in for. Whatever else gets layered on top is a bonus. The discipline to know which is which is what most fast food brands get wrong.