Restaurant Brands Reach for International Loyalty with Rewards Rollouts

As major restaurant brands look to secure consumers’ loyalty all around the world, Chipotle is expanding its Rewards program internationally.

The brand announced Tuesday (June 14) that it had launched Chipotle Rewards in Canada, promising free chips and guacamole with each member’s first purchase to drive adoption.

“Chipotle Rewards is another access point for guests to engage with our promise of real ingredients prepared fresh daily, and a way for us to say thank you for joining our mission of Cultivating a Better World,” Anat Davidzon, managing director of Chipotle Canada, said in a statement.

Chipotle is certainly not the only brand that has been growing the international reach of its loyalty program. In November 2021, McDonald’s extended its loyalty program, which launched in the United States in July 2021, to Canada, and in 2022, the quick-service restaurant (QSR) giant brought its loyalty program to the United Kingdom in January and to Australia in March.

See also: McDonald’s Leverages Loyalty Personalization to Combat Aggregators

Tim Hortons, meanwhile, expanded in the opposite direction, growing its loyalty program from its home market in Canada to the United States, leveraging the learnings from the former.

“Through loyalty, we’ve been able to see our guests through a different lens,” Tim Hortons Canada Senior Director of Digital and Loyalty Sales Ernest Choi told PYMNTS in an interview. “By understanding the individual guest’s participation in the loyalty program and purchasing behaviors better, we’ve started engaging them better — by connecting with them through personalized [customer relationship management (CRM)] and offers.”

Allison Matheson, who occupies the same position for the brand’s U.S. business, added to PYMNTS that, when it comes to loyalty rewards, the United States is “a little earlier on its … journey,” but that the brand has “benefitted so much from the learnings in Canada,” parlaying these insights into the U.S. program.

Related news: Tim Hortons: Loyalty Programs Open Customer Channel Beyond the Restaurant

Starbucks, for its part, offers loyalty rewards in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Kuwait and the Republic of Ireland, according to a June 2021 blog post from Gameball. Additionally, the coffeehouse chain is integrating its rewards program across international customers — according to its site, U.S. members can use their “Stars” (rewards points) in Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Granted, some markets are quicker to adopt loyalty offerings than others. Even within the United States, there are significant differences from one part of the country to the next, according to data from the March/April edition of PYMNTS’ Digital Divide series, “The Digital Divide: Regional Variations in U.S. Food Ordering Trends and Digital Adoption, created in collaboration with Paytronix.

See also: New Research Shows That Regional Dining Quirks Matter in Tailoring Restaurant Offers

The study, which drew from a survey of more than 2,500 U.S. adults who regularly purchase food from restaurants, found that consumers in the Pacific region of the United States (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii) are the most likely to use restaurants’ loyalty programs, with 35% of those in the region reporting that they had done so in the previous 30 days, compared to just 28% of those in the South Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida).