When it comes to breakfast, it appears to many of us with busy lifestyles to be the most important meal of the day. The approach by many fast food or take away meal providers has been to ignore the cost cutting that bedevils other meal times and offer a significant range of products to meet customer needs. It’s the one area of the ‘menu’ where choice has been bucking the trends of austerity.
From the nutrition point of view, this is the meal when our metabolism is at its highest, when we’ve just lurched out of bed and need to be ready for travelling to work usually half an hour ago. The general rule is that carbohydrates are most readily metabolised at this time. Whilst that is a simplistic attitude towards diet, in many ways much of what we eat in the morning is often carbohydrate rich.
What are we able to find on the menu ? Toast, waffles, pancakes, eggs this that and the other, omelettes, salmon, porridge, the English Breakfast (should be trademarked), Welsh Breakfast (ditto) etc. The restaurant menus have got smaller with less eccentric choices but that menu for breakfast is now a full A4/foolscap sheet of delights. Likewise, the range of food service operations delivering different styles has increased from the LSR or limited food service operation to the FSR – the full service operation.
The reasons for increasing nay boosting the selection at morning time is one of competition. In the full service sector a number of mid scale concepts have arrived at providers such as Cracker Barrel and IHOP in the USA. There are regional, national and global offerings to accompany a cup of tea or coffee being offered by all.
In the LSR segment, there is intense competition with the leading performers aggressively leading to avoid other smaller players having too great a foothold in the marketplace. The most notable larger players are Starbucks, McDonalds, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell and then the smaller variants in the USA. There isn’t the range in the UK.
In the consumer conscious environment where service providers still need to entice customers to hand over the cash, providing an exciting product is paramount. I have heard it termed “share of stomach”. many customers find breakfast a cheaper alternative to the evening meal. It is always an occasion for me to visit the breakfast diner and simply peruse the menu before plunging into the frap and ordering. Likewise, staying at a hotel is judged by the quality of the English Breakfast on offer. Critical elements – black pudding, bacon, sausage and canned tomatoes for some bizarre reason – may be to soften the fried bread I guess.
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