Of course, if lightning strikes as it did with the Doritos Locos Taco—which sold 100 million units in its first 10 weeks back in 2012—an LTO can graduate from flavor of the week to main squeeze. Still, that’s hardly the norm. LTOs aren’t necessarily meant as a testing ground for full-time menu items; they’re meant to grab attention. “It’s getting people in the door. It’s not just about the share of stomach anymore—there’s so much more now. It’s about share of attention almost—you have to be relevant in some many different ways, or else,” Miller added.

The fear of stagnation or customer boredom is well founded. There are cautionary tales about what happens when a company banks too heavily on customer routines. Earlier this year, analysts from Deutsche Bank proclaimed that, in addition to its tough stretch of food-contamination episodes, the fast-casual chain Chipotle’s business was suffering from “menu fatigue,” a condition marked by two decades of operations with only one major change in offerings (the addition of tofu, no less). This summer, the company introduced chorizo in a handful of cities ahead of a national unveiling this fall.

With only weeks or a few months for an LTO to run its course, fortune tends to favor the wacky, the familiar, or both. This summer, Popeyes, the New Orleans-born fried-chicken chain, rolled out its Magnolia Blossom Chicken, a battered chicken breast shaped like a flower, with tearable meat petals and a spicy orange dipping sauce. Amy Alarcón, the vice president of culinary innovation at Popeyes, says the company angles for LTOs that thematically align with its Louisiana roots. When one of the franchise’s poultry suppliers came forward with a speciality cut of chicken, the creative process worked around it. “We’ve got this cut that essentially looks like a flower. At the same time we’re going, ‘Oh wow, the Magnolia Blossom is the state flower of Louisiana and it’s such an icon of the South to begin with,” she said. “That’s how a lot of those things happen. We have that perfect synchronicity between the production supply side and then on the creative side and we’re lucky enough to marry ‘em together.” (There’s a particularly compelling theory that the McRib is McDonald’s pork-price arbitrage.)

Once the team had nailed down the concept of the Magnolia Blossom Chicken, they had to figure out what the item would taste like and how that would correspond with the timing of its release.“It’s a summer product, so it has to have some citrusy notes to it and that led us to orange and lemon notes. Then we wanted to round it out with some savory notes so it’s got toasted onion spice added in and roasted garlic,” Alarcón explained, adding that Popeyes “didn’t want floral to come through really strongly so we felt like citrus was a great communicator of that.”