Building a Better Breakfast

It’s Sunday morning before churches have let out, and at Panera Bread just outside Decatur, IL, the line at the counter is already several patrons deep. A dearth of available tables confirms what a full parking lot suggested, that this Panera unit is doing a lively business in a busy commercial area full of breakfast options.

While lunch, system-wide, is Panera’s “bread and butter,” according to Dan Kish, vice president of food for the chain, breakfast comprises a significant portion of receipts. It’s a bakery, after all, and Richmond, MO–based Panera Bread has always taken the daypart seriously.

But in recent years, the chain has upped the A.M. ante. Additions to the menu and service system were designed to bolster its take on the most-important meal of the day.

WAKE UP AND GROW

Recent industry studies suggest that despite the current slowing economy, the breakfast daypart in foodservice is growing. The NPD Group, Inc., Port Washington, NY, reported in March that while dinner in 2007 was down from the previous year, breakfast and snack orders increased.

Chicago-based Technomic, Inc. also reported in March that bakery-cafés are gaining in popularity as a breakfast destination among Americans, with 18% of roughly 3,500 respondents indicating that they most recently visited a bakery-café for breakfast. The reason that percentage isn’t higher, Technomic says, is that of the 57% of respondents who had never visited a bakery-café restaurant, most live in communities without one or, to a lesser degree, aren’t familiar with the menu items typically offered at one.

“We believe this spells significant, untapped opportunity for the already-successful bakery-café segment,” says Darren Tristano, executive vice president, Technomic Information Services. Among respondents who have patronized a bakery-café restaurant, 54% visited Panera on their most-recent occasion.

A BREAKFAST BREAKTHROUGH

According to industry observers, in the waning days of the Atkins Diet—a movement that reached its apex in 2003 to 2004—Panera sought high-protein menu alternatives to its bakery items. So the chain approached one of its vendor partners to develop products that would appeal to what everyone in the foodservice industry believed then was an increasingly carb-eschewing customer.