CHICAGO _ McDonald's all-day breakfast menu, the fast food giant's most successful promotion in recent years, turns 1 this week. To celebrate, the chain is putting more on the griddle.
All-day breakfast has been a huge driver in McDonald's effort to turn around years of lagging sales. The world's largest burger chain, headquartered in suburban Chicago, says giving diners the option of ordering breakfast all day has lured customers back in the door, boosted average sales and provided a spark for change across the company. All-day breakfast has not been without complications, but as year two begins, McDonald's is hoping that a breakfast menu expansion will be what it needs to keep the ball rolling. The chain this fall is expanding its all-day breakfast menu to include McGriddles, a popular breakfast sandwich.
McDonald's announced it was testing all-day breakfast just days after its new CEO, Steve Easterbrook, took the helm last March. By Oct. 6 it was in all 14,000 U.S. stores. The promotion, which customers had requested for years, has been both a symbol of the company's rapid change and a huge factor in bringing lapsed customers back and loyalists in more often.
But serving Egg McMuffins at all hours of the day isn't as simple as just stocking more eggs, cheese and Canadian bacon. To consider rolling out all-day breakfast nationwide, McDonald's had to reconfigure each restaurant's kitchen, making room for an egg cooker that stays on the stove-top all day, a new type of oven and other equipment changes.
It also meant making space on the menu. Adding breakfast items to an already bloated menu would further slow order times, franchise owners warned, so McDonald's scrapped lower-selling McWraps and other items to make room.
As participating restaurants expanded, customers responded. Although some franchisees expressed concern that customers would opt for cheaper breakfast items instead of a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder with Cheese, many actually didn't choose at all: They bought more, on average, by adding a breakfast sandwich to existing orders. All-day breakfast also brought in more customers who hadn't been into a McDonald's in a while.
The new additions also blurred the lines between breakfast, lunch and dinner and brought more customers in between main mealtimes, NPD analyst Bonnie Riggs said, although most breakfast sandwiches outside of the morning hours were consumed at lunch.
In the months after the launch, McDonald's customer satisfaction scores rose to new highs, and so did the company's stock, making Wall Street happy and offering the biggest sign yet that the McDonald's turnaround after years of lagging sales was starting to take shape.
In the past few months, growth at McDonald's and the restaurant industry as a whole has slowed slightly as cheaper grocery prices have driven more Americans to eat at home.
