Breakfast is my favorite meal. Well, one of them, anyhow. It definitely ranks up there with lunch and dinner. But this wasn’t always so.

Maybe it was just that I was always in such a hurry to catch the school bus/hike across campus/dash to work that I never took time to stop and smell the sausage …

Whatever. Like a lot of my generation, I eventually gave up on breakfast, a trend reflected in shrinking sales of ready-to-eat cereal.

And then something odd happened: Breakfast became important again. For some of us, it was having kids and feeling that it was tantamount to child endangerment to send our kids out of the house without ample fortification. For others, it was hearing — until it made our eyes roll — that the answer to middle-age flabbiness and morning fogginess was a metabolism-boosting, mind-sharpening breakfast.

Of course, time is still a factor. More than ever, breakfast is a meal on the run. Which makes it ideally suited to quick service restaurants. So it makes perfect sense that more QSR brands would pile into the morning meal market, challenging the 40 percent share currently built by McDonald’s and Burger King over four decades.

And given that breakfast accounts for 60 percent of growth in the QSR sector over the last five years, the strategy seems to be working.

Or is it? During the same five years, breakfast traffic has increased two percent while dinner sales have declined by the same amount and lunch sales have remained flat. So are breakfast sales cannibalizing from later day parts or is the decline just another result of recession? Who knows.

What is known is that customers who use a restaurant in more than one day part tend to be more loyal to the brand. They’re less likely than ever to go elsewhere and more likely to recommend a concept.

Inconclusive statistics aside, there’s room for breakfast sales growth. QSRs currently account for just 10 percent of all breakfasts consumed in the U.S. And then there’s that 50 percent-plus of Americans under 50 who aren’t eating breakfast … though their mothers are probably still insisting they should.

Most QSR concepts can successfully expand their brand to include breakfast (maybe not Chinese and hot wing outlets so much, and it could be a stretch for pizza concepts unless you’re planning to serve it cold and sell it to college students). But to make breakfast a successful venture, you must to do three things to ensure brand integration:

Consult with Customers

Conduct test groups to determine what current customers value most highly about your brand. Any successful menu expansion depends on their approval and buy-in. A whole new day part makes it even more imperative. Get your core customers’ blessing or brace yourself for disappointment.

Use Brand Sense

Be consistent. Develop a breakfast menu that incorporates elements — flavor profiles, service aspects, graphics, packaging, etc. — that convey your brand identity. If you’re thinking of breakfast as an opportunity to take your brand in Bold New Directions … don’t. Avoid confusing customers with a brand introduction that’s so alien to them it seems to have dropped in from outer space.

Commit and Be Patient

When you’re introducing what every mom knows is “the most important meal of the day” you’ve got to give it some respect — and some promotional budget. If you’re not ready to take a systemwide leap, that’s fine. Choose a test market and give your new menu a big-time introduction there.

Also, give your new menu time. Building a morning day part won’t happen overnight. Initially, a good result might be just breaking even. Resist the urge to futz. You’ve done your homework, so trust what your customers have told you and what your product and marketing teams have created in response. If things really just aren’t moving, retest and tweak incrementally. Then let promotions and word of mouth do their work to build awareness and a following.

With proper branding and a little time, you can be sure that your potential breakfast customers will wake up and smell the coffee.

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