Article
Breakfast is booming
The daypart is becoming the new lunch for QSRs.
March 25, 2006
Breakfast is becoming the new lunch for QSRs. According to the National Restaurant Association, 56 percent of QSR operators serve breakfast and half of that percentage expect the morning meal to represent the majority of their total sales for 2006. For 2005, breakfast sales hit $30.6 billion, a 22 percent increase from 2001.
Breakfast has been so successful for McDonald's that the company contributed its 5.7-percent same-store sales increase in January to the daypart. And Wendy's plans to jump into the breakfast category.
One of the original QSR breakfast giants is Hardee's. According to Hardee's spokesperson Anne Hallock, breakfast represents 45 percent of Hardee's business.
Hardee's most-recent addition, the Steak 'N' Egg Burrito, features grilled steak, plus a blend of Swiss and cheddar cheeses, with two eggs, all wrapped in a large, warm flour tortilla. The burrito looks so tasty that consumers may mistake the stuffings as fresh ingredients when in fact the ingredients are custom-made.
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"If the breakfast burrito is different every time, people will stop eating it. As an operator, you know you're serving the same thing when you serve pre-made goods," she said. "You don't have to worry about entry-level employees changing the portion sizes."
Custom-made sausages
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Happy Joe's Pizza serves and delivers breakfasts pizzas. The sausage is custom made. |
Happy Joe's Pizza and Ice Cream Parlor is a successful pizza chain that is dipping into breakfast. As one of the few pizza players serving this daypart, the 65-unit, Iowa-based company offers cinnamon and caramel-nut rolls, scramblers, pizza omelets, proprietary gourmet coffee and breakfast pizzas.
When the 30-plus-year-old pizza chain tested breakfast four years ago, Joe Whitty, the founder, laughed at his son Larry Whitty, who championed Happy Joe's breakfast.
"I was kind of against it at first because we'd never done breakfast," Joe Whitty said. "But I had to say to myself at some point, 'If you're going to have your son run the company, you'd better give him the leeway to do things.'"
Since then, the concept has grown and is expected to be in nine Happy Joe's Cafez, the chain's new store design, by year's end. Larry Whitty attributes the newfound success to convenience. The store offers dine-in, carryout and breakfast delivery. But he also said the restaurant serves a good, consistent product.
For breakfast, Happy Joe's features sausage in scramblers, omelets and pizza. He said a quality custom-meat manufacturer is an asset to his four-year-old breakfast concept.
"The number-one thing is the manufacturer's ability to replicate a recipe that we have," Larry Whitty said. "It's one thing to give them the recipe and another to make the meat with the same texture and profile."
Editor's note: Steve Coomes contributed to this story.
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