It’s been more than 20 years since Wendy’s has invited folks to breakfast. It wasn’t that the perennial red-haired, pig-tailed pixie didn’t want to be hospitable in the morning, but the memory of omelets that challenged operations and defied dashboard dining remained too fresh in management’s—and consumers’—minds.
In the meantime, the chain began to experience one major hardship after another, beginning, says marketing consultant Laura Ries, with “the devastating loss of its iconic leader, Dave Thomas.”
“It isn’t often that one person is the touch point of an entire brand,” says Ries, president of the Roswell, Georgia, consulting firm Ries & Ries. “But his death in 2002 put the brand and its advertising into a tailspin from which it has been very difficult to recover.”
A former industry innovator, Wendy’s also lost momentum when its new product research and development pipeline virtually dried up, admits company spokesperson Bob Bertini. Then there were the distractions of Tim Hortons and Baja Fresh.
Now Wendy’s has taken a number of serious steps on the comeback trail, and she’s looking leaner and meaner than ever. Recently president and CEO Kerrii Anderson announced that the company had executed an IPO and spin-off of Hortons, divested itself of Baja, and repurchased $1 billion in Wendy‘s stock.
And, says Wendy’s Vice President of Research and Development Lori Estrada, the new product pipeline is filled with hundreds of possibilities, “Seventy-five of which are currently being actively developed and tested” to keep an “ongoing stream” of items, from permanent additions to limited-time offers (LTOS) coming. Last year, 11 new items made their debut on the Wendy’s menu, and 10 more are scheduled for this year.
Undaunted by dayparts, the chain is launching another full-scale foray on breakfast, no longer content to watch its quick-service competitors gobble up the $30.5 billion morning market. During her presentation at the Lehman Brothers 19th Annual Retail Conference in May, Anderson pointed out that breakfast represents 15 percent of all quick-service restaurant revenues and one in every seven of the industry segment’s eating occasions.