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Doug's Domain

Douglas J. Peckenpaugh is community director of content and culinary editor of Food Product Design. His career has centered on food and agricultural publishing, working as a writer, editor and publisher of magazines, books and websites. He also worked as a cook and restaurant manager while earning his B.A. in Professional and Creative Writing from Purdue University.

Breakfast on a Roll

February 10, 2009 Comments

Posted in Blog

Despite the current economy—and because of it—the breakfast daypart in foodservice is seeing quite a bit of activity. People are going out for breakfast instead of dinner to get their away-from-home food fix. Concurrently, operators are expanding their reach into breakfast, or offering it for the first time. For restaurant operators, breakfast is, after all, generally cheaper to prepare than, say, dinner.

As noted on Bloomberg.com, these combined motivations have made breakfast a hot ticket these days, and a wide-ranging scope of activity is afoot, such as the new Starbucks breakfast sandwiches (they just keep trying), omelets at Subway (not necessarily new, but reportedly expanding, as noted in an upcoming article on breakfast activity in CULINOLOGY® magazine ... stay tuned for that one), mini morning sandwiches at Burger King, and, stretching the limits on what we can consider “bread,” the waffle bacon sandwich at Dunkin’ Donuts—and that just scratches the surface of this hotbed of activity.

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to compete in this environment.