McCormick & Company's 2026 Flavor Forecast—its annual global culinary trend report—is producing concrete menu outcomes this summer, with two sequential limited-time offerings at Prince St. Pizza and Go Greek Yogurt built around the company's named Flavor of the Year: Black Currant. The activations, running August 3 through September 28, underscore how ingredient-trend intelligence is increasingly functioning as a product-development engine for foodservice operators rather than a standalone marketing exercise.
The LTO Mechanics
Prince St. Pizza, the 20-location Sicilian-style chain operating across the U.S. and Canada, debuts its first-ever dessert pizza for the program—a Black Currant Big Apple Pie Pizza topped with McCormick Black Currant Finishing Sugar and a frosting drizzle—available at all locations through August 31. The item is orderable for nationwide delivery via UberEats and Postmates, giving the chain a digital-ordering channel beyond its own site and extending the SKU's reach well past its physical footprint. Go Greek Yogurt follows with a limited-edition Black Currant frozen yogurt available at participating locations through September 28, leveraging the brand's high-protein, probiotic-rich base to position the ingredient in a health-adjacent daypart.
For operators, the structure is instructive: McCormick supplies the branded seasoning and finishing sugar as hero ingredients, handling ingredient sourcing and trend credibility, while the restaurant or QSR partner handles menu engineering, production, and guest-facing storytelling. The model reduces new-product development risk and gives operators a built-in trend narrative to support marketing spend.
Why Trend Data Is a Foodservice Tech Story
The Flavor Forecast, now in its 26th year, is produced by a cross-functional team of chefs, food technologists, and trend analysts—a workflow that increasingly resembles a data-and-insights SaaS product more than traditional culinary consulting. For operators running menu-management software, revenue management systems, or digital ordering platforms, third-party trend intelligence of this kind plugs directly into LTO planning cycles: it informs which ingredients to test, which dayparts to target, and which delivery channels to activate.
With McCormick reporting approximately $7 billion in annual sales across 150 countries, the company's Flavor Solutions segment—which sells directly to food manufacturers and foodservice businesses—has the scale to move ingredient supply chains in parallel with operator adoption. That supply-chain coordination matters for multi-unit operators whose kitchen automation and inventory management platforms need lead time to adjust par levels for novel ingredients.
Tabata Gomez, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at McCormick, framed the program's intent around versatility and cultural relevance: the Flavor Forecast's value to operator partners is its ability to surface ingredients before they hit mainstream consumer demand, giving early-adopter chains a window of menu differentiation. Lawrence Longo, CEO of Prince St. Pizza, noted the collaboration enabled the brand to explore "a completely new side of pizza" with dessert-format innovation—a category that has gained traction across fast-casual and slice-shop segments as operators look to expand check averages beyond core dayparts.
For digital ordering and delivery platform strategy, activations like this one also illustrate how national delivery integrations—UberEats, Postmates—are now standard infrastructure for LTO launches at even mid-size chains, allowing operators to measure cover count and average check impact across both in-store and off-premise channels within a single campaign window.
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.
