Bertini explained that the company’s executives project that a successful breakfast menu “could boost individual stores revenues by up to $3,000 per day over time.” As of May, Wendy’s breakfast program was available in about 160 stores in five market areas. By the end of the year, the company expects to have rolled it out to 20 to 30 percent of the system and by 2008 to more than half of all of its 6,000-plus North American restaurants.
“We didn’t want to just roll out our breakfast program nationally to every single store in every single market all at once,” Bertini says. “We’re approaching this roll-out in a very strategic manner, initially selecting stores that make the most sense in terms of location and customer base.”
Bertini points out that Wendy’s learned how much a morning menu misfire can affect overall operations for the rest of the day from its earlier odyssey into omelet territory. “We’ve always been rush-ready for lunch, but our breakfast selections were too complex and required too much time to prepare,” he says. “We pretty much wrecked the transition between breakfast and lunch and found ourselves pulling funds and other resources away from our regular menu to support breakfast.”
That, says Bob Sandelman, president of Sandelman & Associates research firm, was a major error.
“People are even more interested in speed of service at breakfast than they are at lunch,” he explains.
Although at least 70 percent of Wendy’s business goes through its pick-up windows (“We expect that number to be even higher during the breakfast daypart,” Bertini says), the morning items offered by the company in the mid-1980s were built for neither speed nor portability. The new menu’s signature selections, which Estrada says have been making their way through the pipeline for about two and a half years and have been subjected to “a ton” of pre- and post-introduction consumer research were designed to cover both of those criteria.
A prime example is the signature Buttermilk Frescuit (a combination of “fresher biscuit”), a proprietary-recipe square bread carrier formulated to be a moister, less crumbly and, so, neater to eat than traditional biscuits. Baked-on-premise, the Frescuit is filled with egg, cheese, and hickory-smoked bacon.
Warm, soft Kaiser rolls make convenient carriers for the chain’s Steak and Egg (with slices of seasoned steak, bacon, and cheese) and Big Breakfast (with egg, cheese, bacon, and sausage) sandwiches. The Grande Breakfast Burrito wraps scrambled eggs, sausage, roasted breakfast potatoes, and two cheeses in a warm, soft, flour tortilla. A side of hot sauce accompanies the ethnic edible. French Toast Sticks with syrup for dipping round out the signature line-up. And test attempts to revive the omelet—this time in easier-to-eat “bites” isn’t likely to make the cut this time around, Estrada says.
Regional items, such as biscuits with sausage gravy in the South and Midwest and chicken biscuits in the South are also key to the breakfast strategy. “Operationally, they’re easy to execute; our biggest challenge was getting the supply chain in line,” Estrada says. Value-seekers will find a range of 99-cent selections ranging from a sausage and egg burrito to cinnamon rolls.