With white-collar executives spending more time than ever before at the office, businesses are adding a new perk to the proceedings: the offering of breakfast to time-strapped workers who spend more time in the board room than in the dining rooms of favorite restaurants.
Offering breakfast is a smart move for businesses — and not just because it keeps employees happy, motivated and hungry to contribute ideas. Operators also are reaping monetary benefits by offering catered breakfasts, both hot and cold, among other things.
Just ask Ron Vogal, owneroperator of Booeymonger, a four-unit, upscale fast-casual deli concept located in the greater Washington, D.C., area and specializing in local breakfast catering.
"We started offering catering about 10 or 15 years ago, but now it's become a major part of our business," Vogal said. "Over the last couple of years, though, our catering business has increased dramatically. At three of our locations, the breakfast business has doubled." Vogal said total annual sales for his restaurants average between $7 million and $8 million a year — and of that figure, catering accounts for about 25 percent of the revenue.
The operator notes that catering the morning meal, while not necessarily a new idea, is one that is growing in popularity.
"More and more businesses are catering breakfast in," Vogal said. "For example, we do a lot of business with Microsoft, at the training facility located across the street from us. They realized that the way to get people to go to the training and get them there on time was to offer some breakfast." Vogal said his restaurants specialize in catering continental breakfast items — coffee, muffins, bagels and juice. But because there is so much competition in the daypart these days, Booeymonger does things a little differently by offering mini portions, which appeals to those diners watching their diets and portion sizes.
"We're one of four caterers in the area doing breakfast," Vogal said. "Everyone is kind of doing it, so we thought to ourselves it would be a little different if we offered mini stuff instead of huge muffins and larger portions of fresh fruit and salad items. That way it's a little bit of a healthier product. And to that end, while we used to serve the bagels with cream cheese on them, we now offer it on the side."
Vogal added that his restaurants will cater hot breakfasts upon request but noted, "they're pretty difficult to deliver. Hot food, for one thing, is difficult to keep hot and good." Booeymonger, Vogal estimated, sends out at least four or five breakfast catering deliveries a day from his location in Bethesda, Md., alone, and that's not including the business he does in-house at his four 100-seat restaurants, where it is not unusual for him to sell between 150 and 200 hot breakfast sandwiches and full breakfast plates daily.
Robyn Bailey, director of marketing for Huddle House, the 420-unit, Atlanta-based family-restaurant chain, said with the catering trend growing, her company is beginning to offer the catering option to businesses and is exploring the possibility of increasing that business as a new profit center.
"You can see, certainly, that the trend toward catering is getting bigger and bigger," she said. "We've started offering a party platter, but now we're wanting to move into other areas.
At Brig's Great Beginnings, a four-unit casual-dining operation with locations in Raleigh, Durham and Cary, N.C., owner David Brigham said catering is done buffet style and that offerings consist of everything from eggs Benedict to eggs, pancakes and bacon or sausage to steak and eggs. He even compiles personalized menus, using company logos when he prints them up for use.
"Often, to make life simpler, the business will e-mail their logo over to us, and we'll make a limited, specialized menu for them," Brigham said. "We tell them their meeting will go faster if they preorder from the four or five items we're offering them. And they love the special menus, seeing their logos on top. It makes them feel like we took extra special care of them."
For Aramark Corp., the Philadelphia- based contract foodservice company that specializes in corporate dining accounts across the country, catering breakfast meetings has become the norm these days rather than the exception, and brand recognition has become a successful part of that equation.
"We've developed a great rapport with the administrative assistants in this building," said Robert Maxwell, an Aramark executive chef for a Fortune 500 firm based in Plano, Texas. "Based on the knowledge we have, we know what they want us to serve on the menu every day. And if they have certain ideas or requests about something they want, they can call down and tell us what they'd like. Also, we have freshbaked goods brought in every day from Dunkin' Donuts for those folks who aren't looking for traditional breakfast items. They're the same muffins they can get at the store, and we use them for catering and also in the cafeteria. That brand recognition is a big key."
Maxwell noted that in addition to the increase in catered business meetings, customers have shown growing interest in purchasing more graband- go items.
"That's been a real trend," he said. "Breakfast shouldn't be time consuming or expensive."
To that end, he said, the facility recently added a yogurt bar that offers a variety of flavored yogurts and parfaits, fresh granola, berries, nuts and fruit, as well as an oatmeal bar where diners can order and take out various types of fresh oatmeal and toppings. "They can go and take it in a hurry," he said.
But for those customers who are looking to hold breakfast meetings at their restaurants of choice, more operators are offering that option, too. Huddle House's Bailey said she's seeing a number of business executives holding morning meetings at several of its stores.
"You go into the stores and see more and more breakfast meetings happening," she said. "We have the booths, and people bring in their laptops and have a high-quality breakfast cooked to order. They can stay there, conduct business and have a great meal at a great price.
Bailey added that she is one of those executives usually pressed for time that wants to enjoy a good breakfast while conducting business at the same time.
"We're really just trying to provide customers with what they need," she said, "I'm typically one of those people who has a breakfast meeting planned. At some stores we do offer free WiFi, but it's available on a store-to-store basis only.
"We do have a bunch of different groups that actually meet at our place and push their tables together and conduct business," he said. "Most of them order breakfast and have sort of informal meetings. We used to offer WiFi, but to be honest, our table space is limited, and we are in business to be in business, so we can't have people sitting and sitting and sitting [while they are online]. It's much more difficult to tell people we need the space, so it's to our business advantage not to offer it anymore. Table space is a commodity, and we need all the tables we can get.
"Besides, a lot of people who need to be on their computers are carrying their own wireless cards and can get online by themselves," he added.
In addition to providing catering and space for business meetings on-site, operators also have embraced the idea of portability, hence the popularity of the breakfast sandwich, which is something Huddle House now is rolling out in a variety of flavors.
"When people are making decisions [about what they want to eat], taste registers first, but yes, they are time constrained, so the challenge is to provide that taste and quality in an acceptable amount of time," Bailey said. "Typically, our customers are out the door in an average of between 15 and 20 minutes. So right now we're going to do meat and cheese and egg and cheese to start, but we're looking at a lot of different kinds of offerings." She added that the push for more portable and grab-andgo items on the menu is because the chain must compete with others in the segment for the daypart's business.
"Anybody getting a share of the stomach at breakfast is someone we're competing with," Bailey noted. "The portions, the quick turnaround and the value are where we compete best. It's important to remember that just because a person is on the go doesn't mean he or she shouldn't be treated well. Just because a person is rushed doesn't mean they have to be made to feel like others are rushing them, too."