I love seeing a good Food-for-Downloads™ promotion that actually works. It doesn't have to be intricate or wild in any way, something dessert company Crumbl showed last week with its simple 6 for 4 promotion for its birthday.
Although Crumbl's promotion was also available in-store, which only partially qualifies it as a Food-for-Downloads™ promotion, it led me to check Crumbl's downloads trend, where I found out just how many people have downloaded the app since it launched six years ago.
And it was more than I expected!
Our App Intelligence shows that in 2024, Crumbl managed to grow its daily downloads from an average of around 10K in January to more than 30K in August. Together, those added up to a smidge over 5M downloads so far this year. That's more downloads than Chipotle got this year.
At this rate, Crumbl should beat last year's haul of 6.5M downloads and if growth continues, may get close to beating its best year to date, 2022, which scored the cookie maker 8.7M downloads.
Since its launch back in 2018, the Crumbl app has made its way into more than 25M phones, according to our estimates.
For contrast, rival cookie chain Insomnia had 2M downloads since the begining of 2017 - less than 10%. That's a big win for Crumbl.
Being on-device gives food chains a great marketing advantage and is the kind of power-up that not only enables growth but also takes a potential customer away from a competitor. A win-win. That's why I expect we'll continue to see such promotions, especially such simple ones.
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