Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers is deploying a three-tiered loyalty promotion for National Frozen Custard Day, offering app members discounted custard at $2 for a mini, $3 for a regular, and $4 for a large — valid Friday, Aug. 7 through Sunday, Aug. 9 at participating locations across its 580-plus-unit footprint in the U.S. and Canada.
All three offers are loaded simultaneously to members' accounts on Aug. 7, with each redeemable once per device, per user. Guests can use one offer per order via dine-in, drive-thru, or app and web orders. Third-party delivery and catering are excluded, and the deals cannot be stacked with other discounts or coupons.
Loyalty as the Engine
The promotion is entirely gated behind the Freddy's app, a deliberate strategy to deepen engagement with its loyalty base rather than discount broadly at the forecourt or counter. App-gated deals have become a standard playbook across fast-casual and convenience foodservice operators alike — driving downloads, increasing visit frequency, and capturing first-party data. For Freddy's, loading all three offers at once creates a multi-visit incentive over a single weekend window, a format increasingly common among chains looking to stretch a single promotional event across several dayparts and days.
Product Differentiation
Freddy's positions frozen custard as a premium alternative to standard soft-serve or packaged ice cream. The chain churns custard fresh on-site multiple times daily, a process it says produces a denser, richer product by reducing ice crystals and excess air — a meaningful point of differentiation for a dispensed dessert program competing against both QSR soft-serve and retail packaged goods. That back-of-house freshness claim also supports a higher price ceiling than typical c-store or QSR dessert items, even at the promotional $2–$4 price points on offer this weekend.
For convenience operators tracking foodservice-at-cstore trends, the Freddy's model is a useful benchmark: a made-fresh dessert program anchored by loyalty, tiered pricing, and limited-time offers generates repeat traffic without permanent margin erosion. NACS data has consistently shown that dispensed beverages and frozen treats remain among the highest-margin inside-sales categories for c-store foodservice programs, and the fast-casual segment's aggressive use of app-based promotions is raising guest expectations around personalization and value across all retail foodservice channels.
Founded in Wichita, Kansas, in 2002, Freddy's ranked No. 6 on Fast Casual's Top 100 Movers + Shakers and No. 85 on Entrepreneur's Franchise 500, reflecting its standing as one of the more active growth franchises in the better-burger and frozen dessert space.
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.
