Cold Stone Creamery is deploying two limited-time Creations for the fall selling window, pairing the return of a branded fan-favorite with a new graham cracker-forward build designed to capture cooler-weather daypart traffic. Both items are available system-wide at Cold Stone Creamery's approximately 1,500 locations globally through November 17, 2026.
The LTO Lineup
The returning SKU, Going Bananas for JELL-O Pudding, combines JELL-O Banana Cream Pudding Ice Cream with NILLA Wafers, banana, and whipped topping — a nostalgia-anchored build that leans on the recognizability of two Kraft Heinz heritage brands to reduce trial friction. The new entry, Crumb and Get It, features HONEY MAID Graham Cracker Ice Cream mixed with cookie dough, HONEY MAID Graham Crackers, and cookie butter, extending the brand's co-branded ingredient strategy into a s'mores-adjacent flavor profile that has shown consistent seasonal traction across the QSR dessert segment.
Courtney Maxedon, VP of Marketing and Digital Strategy at Kahala Brands — Cold Stone's Scottsdale-based parent — framed the dual-item approach as balancing familiarity with discovery. The tactic is well-worn in franchise dessert concepts: returning LTOs lower re-introduction marketing costs while a companion new item gives operators and local franchisees a fresh reason to push promotional messaging.
Franchise and Segment Context
Cold Stone operates within Kahala Brands' portfolio of nearly 30 fast-casual and QSR concepts spanning roughly 3,000 locations across 35 countries. For individual franchisees, fall LTO cycles carry meaningful unit-economics weight: the September-through-November window historically represents a traffic trough for ice cream concepts as ambient temperatures drop, making limited-time flavor stories and branded co-marketing one of the more cost-efficient tools to sustain check counts between the summer peak and holiday gift-card push.
The co-branded ingredient model — anchoring proprietary ice cream flavors to nationally recognized CPG names like JELL-O and HONEY MAID — also gives franchisees a built-in consumer shortcut at the point of purchase, reducing the need for extensive in-store education on flavor profiles. That matters in a franchise system where unit-level labor and training budgets are finite and suggestive selling must be efficient.
The broader QSR dessert and snack segment has continued to see operators lean into comfort-flavor narratives through the back half of the year, a trend visible across frozen-treat and snack-focused franchise development as chains compete for share of the afternoon and evening dayparts. Cold Stone's emphasis on customization — ice cream mixed to order on a frozen granite stone — differentiates the experience from grab-and-go competitors, though it also means throughput depends heavily on crew execution at the unit level.
For more on seasonal LTO strategy and its impact on QSR unit performance, Foodservice News has tracked how limited-time flavor programs increasingly function as the primary traffic-generation lever for dessert-focused franchise systems navigating off-peak seasonality.
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.
