Jack has an offer: 1M free burgers

In the never-ceasing battle of the burgers, Jack in the Box is advancing to the front lines with a giveaway of a million of its new Double Jacks that it announced in its Sunday Super Bowl commercial.

With the burgers retailing at $4.79 apiece, the promotion is a costly bet that its new menu item with its heavily promoted buttery “bakery” bun, ample lettuce and tomatoes, and traditional mayo will pay off in huge return business.

The San Diego-based company’s “Declaration of Delicious” campaign, celebrated in a TV ad that’s a takeoff of George Washington crossing the Delaware — but with Jack at the helm — will showcase the double burgers. At the same time, Jack in the Box is also hoping to draw attention to numerous other menu upgrades.

The offer of a free Double Jack, which debuted at the end of last month, or Jumbo Jack burger is redeemable online where coupons will be emailed to those who register.

“It started with all the menu changes we implemented,” said Iwona Alter, vice president of product marketing and innovation. “The scope of the change was so huge we thought, how can we show those changes to our guests.

“The million burgers giveaway is to show how confident we are in the changes, so instead of guests taking our word for it, we wanted them to experience the changes firsthand — putting our money where our mouth is. That’s one of the phrases we repeated at the front office.”

Gone are the chain’s longtime sesame buns, and in their place are the butter-glazed buns, complemented with ample layers of lettuce and tomato that focus groups said they wanted and which are absent on Jack’s Ultimate Cheeseburger. The burgers also feature traditional mayo instead of a signature Jack in the Box onion mayo sauce.

Alter said the company listened closely to what its longtime customers had to say, which influenced another feature of the Double Jack — no salt and pepper. Jack in the Box wanted the beef flavor to stand on its own.

“We found from our research that flavor is very important to the overall taste of the burger, and the hand leaf lettuce will ensure crispness and crunch,” Alter said. “We wanted to make sure people who love our burgers before will love them now.”

The same upgrades Jack in the Box has incorporated in the Double Jack, like the mayo and buttery bun, apply to a number of other items on the menu, such as the chain’s spicy chicken sandwich. The Double Jack was first tested in San Diego last June before it was launched systemwide.

Jack in the Box’s latest gambit in the high-stakes, fast-food burger arena comes as burger giant McDonald’s has been making a strong comeback from what had been declining sales in 2014. The credit, though, goes not to burgers, but to the popularity of its all-day breakfast.

Jack in the Box CEO Leonard Comma did not seem overly threatened by the potential impacts from daylong breakfast offerings, something that the San Diego chain already has been doing for some time.

“When we narrow it down to one of our major competitors doing the breakfast all day, certainly it’s going to impact everybody in the industry,” Comma said during an earnings call last November. “But what we’ve been able to do is focus on hamburgers and drive sales by really speaking to our own game. And at the same time that we’re doing that, we are not seeing that the breakfast all-day launch for McDonald’s is overall killing our business.”