Chick-fil-A Inc. announced the addition of two new menu items—the Chick-fil-A Yogurt Parfait and the Chick-fil-A House Roast Coffee—at Chick-fil-A restaurants beginning January 4. The Yogurt Parfait responds to customers’ growing demands for lower-fat alternatives for breakfast and for menu items that can be served as a healthy snack or dessert option throughout the day.
The addition of both menu items reflects increasingly diverse tastes of the chain’s expanding customer base, as well as direct feedback from its successful market tests in Indianapolis; Austin, Texas; and Knoxville, Tennessee. The additions also are expected to help grow its breakfast daypart—an area Chick-fil-A has focused on for the past several years, as its chicken-based morning menu has steadily grown with breakfast customers.
The new Yogurt Parfait includes slices of strawberries covered in vanilla yogurt topped with either Chick-fil-A’s own Harvest Nut Granola blend or Chocolate Cookie Crumbs. Topped with granola, the Yogurt Parfait has 240 calories and 5 grams of fat, and the cookie crumb option brings the parfait down to 200 calories with 4.5 grams of fat. Both choices also are trans-fat free. Initially promoted as a breakfast option, the parfait will be offered throughout the day and starts at $2.25.
The new Chick-fil-A House Roast Coffee is a 100 percent Colombian blend that will replace the chain’s current Coffeehouse Light and Bistro Dark offerings. The medium-roast blend will also be offered as a decaf option. The individual restaurants will continue utilizing all existing coffee currently in the system until its depleted and the chain anticipates the new coffee will be in all units by mid January.
“Based on the feedback we received during the market test of these products, our customers have made it clear that they want healthier alternatives for breakfast,” says Woody Faulk, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of brand strategy and design, who oversees the chain’s menu strategy. “With the addition of the Yogurt Parfait offering, we believe we now have a breakfast menu with broader appeal to a more diverse customer base—from our signature Chicken Biscuit for the more hearty appetite to the Cinnamon Cluster for those craving something sweet in the morning to the health-minded customer who now has an additional choice of a Yogurt Parfait. We also found that customers enjoyed the Yogurt Parfait as a snack or dessert option throughout the day.”
“The success of Chick-fil-A House Roast Coffee during the 2009 breakfast test indicated to us that—in some cases—it’s okay to simplify, too,” Faulk says. “Our new House Roast Coffee is a ‘happy medium’ between our former light- and dark-roasts, and proved to be a hit with customers during our market test.”
With the made-from-scratch Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit developed as the chain’s flagship breakfast offering, Chick-fil-A introduced its full breakfast menu in 1986 as it began expansion outside of shopping malls and started opening stand-alone restaurants, which catered better to breakfast business. Today, breakfast accounts for more than 17 percent of the chain’s overall sales. Chick-fil-A continues to see the morning daypart as a promising opportunity to further grow the business and has steadily focused on maximizing the breakfast day part with a variety of menu enhancements and chain-wide promotions during the past several years.
