How to unlock Wawa’s secret menu and get birthday cake shakes
The touchscreen kiosks may’ve removed all human interaction from ordering lunch at Wawa, but they have one thing their human predecessors didn’t: the ability to hide surprises in their interface.
Right now, if you know where to press, you can unlock one of those Easter eggs to access a new “secret menu” from the Pennsylvania-based convenience store giant.
It’s unclear exactly when the hidden feature rolled out. A reddit poster noted on April 1 that news of the secret menu was floating around an internal Wawa employee message board, and a separate thread confirmed it was active in the wild as of this week.
A visit to the Headhouse Square Wawa in Philadelphia Tuesday morning revealed the secret menu was up and running.
To get to it, press on the gracefully animated Wawa goose at the far bottom left of the touchscreen.
The clever UX designers try to trick you by making it look like that’ll take you to the allergen info, but nooooope. Instead, you get a relatively impressive vault animation, presenting with great fanfare the secret items…
…of which there are only two. The entire secret menu consists of a birthday cake milkshake or a birthday cake smoothie. Oh, the excitement.
MORE: Check out BillyPenn.com
You can opt to get each one in either regular (16 oz.) or large (24 oz.), priced from $3.69 to $4.29. (These secret items come with a not-so-hidden helping of more than 1,000 calories, so keep that in mind.) After you’ve chosen your decadent dessert-as-drink, the screen presents you with the oxymoronic prompt to tell the world about it.
“Some secrets are meant to be shared!” says the screen, proffering the hashtag #WawaSecretMenu.
Which is the kicker: No secret menus are ever actually supposed to be kept secret.
Everyone and their mother knows about the one at In-N-Out, which possibly started the craze, but dozens of other chains have since adopted the marketing ploy, including Starbucks, Chipotle and Taco Bell.
Welcome to the secret menu party, Wawa.
ON TOP OF THE NEWS: Billy Penn stories in your inbox every day.
Billy Penn is a USA TODAY content partner. Its content is produced independently of the USA TODAY Network.