It starts out as usual: A cook mixes flour, sugar, eggs and blueberries into a creamy, blue-tinged waffle batter. Then there’s a departure: He folds in cubic chunks of rich, New York cheesecake.

The Very Blueberry Cheesecake Waffle is one of IHOP’s two new Waffulicious Waffles, menu items that are equal parts breakfast and social media marketing campaign by the restaurant chain’s parent, Glendale’s DineEquity Inc.

These waffles on steroids follow a formula that has been seized on by the food world recently: artery-clogging combinations that are primed for the look-what-I’m-about-to-eat selfie. Put another way, it’s food designed to be posted and diners might want to eat waffles full of cheesecake. But even more, they want to post photographic proof that they engaged in the event of eating them. And DineEquity and other companies are increasingly betting that new, strange creations can create the next viral hit.

“The age of social media means that every great moment, every meal, every never-seen-before item on a menu comes out into the public and gets shared with a network,” said Kirk Thompson, IHOP’s vice president of marketing. “It’s much more powerful than pure advertising.”

People trust their friends’ recommendations more than the actors in television ads, he said. Someone who reads a friend’s tweet or Facebook post about a delicious, diet-ending-but-worth-it waffle they had for brunch is more likely to actually dine at IHOP than someone who just hears about it. There’s also the fear of missing out. When someone sees that some of their friends are talking about a product, they might try it so they don’t feel excluded from the conversation.

Mary Chapman, the senior director of product innovation at the Chicago restaurant research firm Technomic Inc., said IHOP and other restaurants have seen this strategy work, driving sales and brand awareness.

“The trend is how big can you go? How weird? And so these items are often crafted more for social media buzz than for eating,” she said. “Because of social media, a chain like IHOP that isn’t known for being hip with people in their 20s and 30s can say, ‘Look at this hip thing IHOP is doing.’”

Doubling down

IHOP is far from the first company to consciously choose extreme menu items based on their potential to be Internet sensations. Dominique Ansel Bakery’s cronut – essentially a deep-fried croissant – caused traffic-stopping lines in New York a few years ago, and, of course, there are Irvine chain Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos – crunchy tacos in a shell coated with Doritos flavoring.

But the phenomenon blew up in 2010 with the Double Down, KFC’s “sandwich” of cheese and bacon between two pieces of fried chicken.

The Frankenfood, which has since returned for another limited run, went viral online almost immediately, with equal amounts of praise and rage at its nutritional content amid an obesity epidemic. And that’s exactly what KFC had hoped and planned for, said Rodrigo Coronel, a spokesman for the Louisville, Ky., fried-chicken chain.

“The secret sauce for going viral is monitoring what people are talking about, what is happening in pop culture and what people want right now, then reacting fast – especially on social media – and creating something unique,” Coronel said.

IHOP followed that strategy with its new waffles, starting out by researching what was trending in the realm of indulgent food, Thompson said.

Then the company completed several rounds of taste tests, both in-house and with consumers, before settling on two limited-time offerings: the Very Blueberry Cheesecake Waffle, which aside from the baked-in berries and cheesecake is topped with even more cheesecake pieces and a sweetened blueberry syrup, and the Bac ’n’ Cheddar Waffle, which is filled with hickory-smoked bacon and cheddar cheese, then topped with additional bacon. IHOP launched the waffles Sept. 8, and they’ll be available through Nov. 2.

Like the Double Down, they aren’t healthy eating. The cheesecake waffle has 750 calories, while the bacon cheddar edition has a whopping 820, plus an impressively unhealthy 1,620 milligrams of sodium – two-thirds of your daily recommended dose.

But carrots and hummus don’t go viral on the Internet. Part of the appeal of taking a selfie with a bacon-loaded waffle is how brazenly it bucks health trends.

The way IHOP spokesman Craig Hoffman frames it, customers have a choice between an omelet with vegetables or a waffle baked and topped with bacon or cheesecake. Since IHOP provides nutritional information for the items, it’s clear that the Waffulicious Waffles are for a cheat day.

“I think that most people who see cheesecake as an ingredient probably have a pretty good idea it’s not going to be low calorie,” he said.

Driving sales

IHOP’s is not banking on Waffulicious sales alone. Rather, those and other special offerings are part of a long game.

The 1,600-location chain rolls out limited-time offers six or seven times a year on average, and those items account for about 8 percent of sales, said Darrin Kellaris, senior manager of media marketing for the company. The hope is that the buzz generated by their latest photogenic option will guide lapsed customers back to the menu items that make up the other 92 percent of sales: the eggs, potatoes, and, of course, pancakes that customers might not think to tweet about.

Limited-time offers are central to IHOP’s marketing strategy, according to Kellaris, and this is not the first time the chain has been on the hunt for a viral hit. Two items – Jelly Donut Pancakes, complete with doughnut glaze, and Brioche French Toast with bananas foster or other toppings – became so popular that they were added to the main menu.

In addition, Applebee’s, another DineEquity chain, has recently been going hard with the selfie set. As part of the chain’s marketing for its 1,400-calorie Quesadilla Burger – a burger with a quesadilla for a bun – Applebee’s added a hashtag to menus, and is now seeing daily posts on Instragram and other social networks, said Kevin Mortesen, DineEquity’s vice president of communications. During one campaign, the Quesadilla Burger hashtag was mentioned in tweets and retweets more than 92 million times.

The Waffulicious Waffles are getting there. Since their release, there have been almost 500 original tweets about the cheesecake waffles alone, according to San Francisco social analytics firm Topsy. Most have been positive.

One Twitter user wrote, “IHOP offering new waffle with cheddar & bacon baked in, topped with more bacon #Merica,” which was accompanied by a photo of the waffles. It was retweeted 192 times.