Jeremiah's Italian Ice is adding a holiday-season limited-time offering to its frozen-dessert menu, debuting Hot Chocolate Italian Ice as the foundation of a five-item Holiday Flavorites Collection available November 1 through December 31 at participating locations nationwide.
The launch marks the Orlando-based franchise's first foray into a chocolate-forward Italian Ice base, extending a product architecture that has historically leaned on fruit and cream flavors. The move aligns with a broader quick-service dessert trend: seasonal LTOs that trade on warm-beverage nostalgia — hot cocoa, peppermint bark, candy cane — translated into cold-format treats.
The Five-Item Lineup
The collection builds the new Hot Chocolate Ice into every menu entry, layered with Vanilla Soft Ice Cream and one or more toppings. The Frozen Hot Chocolate Flavorite pairs the base with Mini Marshmallows; the Peppermint Bark Flavorite swaps those for Crushed Peppermint Candies; the Candy Cane Hot Chocolate Flavorite combines both. Beyond the cup-and-cone formats, the brand added two shareable formats: a Peppermint Bark Jelati® Cake — sliceable layers of Hot Chocolate Ice and Vanilla Soft Ice Cream finished with Crushed Peppermint Candies — and a Peppermint Oreo® Ice Cream Sandwich featuring peppermint-flavored ice cream between Oreo® cookies. The addition of a whole-cake SKU signals a push into group-occasion and catering occasions, a segment that frozen-dessert chains have increasingly pursued to widen their average check.
Franchise Footprint Context
Jeremiah's, founded in 1996 and franchising since 2019, now operates or has in development more than 175 locations across eleven states concentrated in the Sun Belt — Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and others. The chain ranked No. 211 on Entrepreneur magazine's 2026 Franchise 500® list and placed inside Technomic's Top 500 U.S. Chain Restaurants, benchmarks that reflect its rapid unit-count growth since entering franchising. The Holiday Flavorites launch is a system-wide activation, giving franchisees a traffic-driving vehicle during what can be a softer shoulder season for frozen-treat concepts in cooler climates.
"The holidays are all about creating memorable experiences with family and friends, and food has always been a big part of that," said Michael Keller, Chief Executive Officer of Jeremiah's Italian Ice. "Our Holiday Flavorites give guests a fun, festive way to celebrate the season while enjoying the bold flavors and frozen treats that make Jeremiah's unique."
Limited-time flavor programs have become a standard traffic and franchisee-support lever across the frozen and specialty dessert segment, with chains from Dairy Queen to smaller regional operators using seasonal menus to compress trial windows and generate social media engagement. For a franchise system still in a growth phase, a nationally consistent LTO also serves an internal purpose: it demonstrates to prospective franchisees that the brand can execute coordinated marketing campaigns across a multi-state footprint. Operators and foodservice analysts tracking franchise expansion in the QSR dessert space will note that Jeremiah's Datassential recognition for "America's Most Unique Restaurant Menu" in 2026 underscores a differentiation strategy built on format and flavor novelty rather than price competition.
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.
