When Habit Burger & Grill was considering the best strategies with which to do value about a year ago, the company dialed one of the experts in the business: Taco Bell.
Actually, the fast-casual burger chain tried to figure out value on its own for a while. It didn’t work. “Our first couple of forays in that area were where I think my kids might call it ‘mid,’” Shannon Hennessy, Habit’s CEO, told moderator Alicia Kelso, executive editor with Nation’s Restaurant News, at the Restaurant Leadership Conference last week.
That’s when Habit called upon Taco Bell. While it may be another restaurant chain entirely, it happens to be owned by the same corporate overlord, Yum Brands.
“We called them up and said, we need some brain power around this,” Henessy said. It’s “incredible how they deliver value, platforms and not products.” So, executives from Habit, Taco Bell and Collider, Yum’s in-house marketing platform, got together and helped the burger chain figure out a value offer that worked.
The result was a group of value deals priced at $6, $8 and $10, similar to Taco Bell’s Luxe Boxes priced at $5, $7 and $9. “We spitballed a bunch of concepts and figured out how to deliver what really worked,” Hennessy said.
Value has become a crucial part of the restaurant industry playbook in 2026, as consumers pressured by years of inflation seek lower prices when they dine out.
For the Plano, Texas-based Yum, which also owns KFC and Pizza Hut, the story is a lesson in one of the company’s crucial goals, to get its different companies to share best practices and other ideas.
In many cases, that means leaning on Taco Bell, which has been one of the restaurant industry’s most consistent performers over the past 15 years. The fast-food Mexican chain thrived in 2025, with domestic system sales up 6.5%. That was the strongest performance among the 10 largest restaurant chains on the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report last year.
Neither KFC nor Habit have been able to match that. Both chains have slumped over the past couple of years, and their system sales declined in 2025.
Much of Taco Bell’s strength is in its ability to balance value and innovation. And the company has refused to let its foot off the gas. The Luxe Boxes were successful last year with a combination of low price points and innovative offerings. So, this year it added to that platform with the $3 Luxe Value Menu.
“It was about bringing some innovation to that sub-$3 price point,” said Meg Farren, president of Taco Bell North America. “We’ll be able to bring innovation to that range and bring fresh new items. I think that’s what people need. They love innovation to talk about.”
KFC borrowed a page from the Taco Bell playbook when it created its Box Feasts lineup, featuring selections of chicken sandwiches, tenders, fries and drinks priced at $7, $9 and $11. Catherine Tan-Gillespie, president of KFC U.S., noted that the chain’s $5 bowls and its $10 Tuesdays—offering a bucket of chicken for $10—have done well so far.
“We’re having to get surgical on value,” Tan-Gillespie said. “The clue is in the name. We’ve always been very successful at abundance in value. I think now even more so price point is becoming critical.”
Innovation is also critical for each of these brands to keep pace with an ever-evolving and hotly competitive restaurant industry. Restaurant chains have introduced a record number of limited-time offers each of the past three years, according to Technomic data.
Habit earlier this year introduced the largest number of new products it ever has on a single day, which made Hennessy and her team nervous. “We were biting our nails around that,” she said. “Because it was a lot of change in a single day for our operators to pull off, for our marketing teams to pull off.”
And yet within that group of innovative new products came the best-performing LTO in the chain’s history, the Baja Crispy Fish Sandwich with Crispy Street Corn Tots. “I think we’re defying what we think might be possible in terms of innovation in our system,” she said.
That is also a challenge for brands. Companies can’t just push innovative new products, that will leave the budget diners behind. But focusing just on value has its own set of problems. Finding the right combination is a lot like threading a needle.
“It’s a constant balance,” Farren said. “You can’t overplay on just value, and you can’t overplay and rely on just innovation. We thread the needle very carefully [to] make sure we give the customers what they need today while also looking after what we think they need and want next year.”
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