Top of the morning
The hardest food sales to drive up across the industry are, without doubt, breakfast products. While travel terminals do well with the first meal of the day, since it is as much about consuming time as food and drink, the grab-and-go high street concepts with coffee and sweet snacks can only just about make breakfast profitable, with croissants and doughnut sales seldom making it past lunchtime.
It used to be a mealtime cash cow for hotels, with city-centre four-star hotels able to charge £10-plus for breakfast and build it into the overnight price package, but the growing trend of room-only hotel rates has hit breakfast sales, as business travellers often make do with the in-room hospitality tray.
Breakfast destinations
So when JD Wetherspoon took the decision last year to open every one of its 622 pubs at 10am to become breakfast destinations before the conventional lunchtime pub trade kicked in, it caused surprise and raised doubts among other pub operators. The risk Wetherspoon's ran was that the increased staffing and operational costs might not meet revenues for a public still believing that going into a pub at 10am is not the done thing.
Phil Sermon, head of catering for Wetherspoon's pubs, says that far from producing operational losses, breakfast is turning in a good profit, even though breakfast menu prices reflect the same cut-price policy as Wetherspoon's beer. Sermon says the low prices coupled with the prime town-centre location of the sites is one the main drivers of profits. "We do a full English breakfast for £2.99 and hot drinks from 59p. A breakfast bap with bacon, egg and sausage is £1.99 or you can just have tea and toast."
The perceived value for money means the customer base is extremely wide. Pensioners and students see it as cheaper than cooking for themselves, it's an easy venue for early-morning town-centre business meetings, while town-centre shoppers and sports fans needing to be in a stadium by very early afternoon can take a mid-morning brunch and skip lunch.
It is not just operators which are keen to push breakfast sales - it is also in the interest of breakfast food manufacturers. One of the ways both manufacturers and caterers are increasingly promoting breakfast sales is through a trading partnership with visible branding of food items in the breakfast restaurant.
While most hotels would flinch of the thought of logo-branding at lunch or dinner, the growing view is that it is not only acceptable at breakfast, but an encouragement to sales. The point-of-sale brand information can be on the self-service breakfast buffet or on the breakfast menu card, with something as discreet as printing the familiar product logo.
Purchasing deals
For the big food manufacturers serving both retail and catering - as most do and often with exactly the same product - the catering division will benefit in restaurant sales on the back of the retail marketing budget. For the hotel, the main benefit is that in exchange for printing the breakfast product logo on the menu, there is a trade-off on a better purchasing deal.
Hilton Hotels is one of several hotel chains that has recognised the benefits to itself and customers by entering into breakfast brand promotion partnerships. The Cobham Hilton in Surrey has trialled Quaker Oats as a front of house breakfast option using a Quaker Oats branded bain-marie on the servery. The three-month trial between Hilton and Quaker Oats - which also owns the other major porridge brand Scott's Porage Oats - has just ended and is being evalued.
Paul Wright, deputy general manager at the Cobham Hilton, is enthusiastic about the collaboration. He says that if the outcome is deemed a success, 65 out of the 73 Hiltons in the UK will promote the two products on breakfast serveries - Scott's Porage Oats in Scotland and Quaker Oats in England and Wales.
Pubs and hotels are not the only catering outlets considering niche opportunities for breakfast sales. Scolarest, the school catering division of Compass Group, began looking into launching a breakfast service at Esh Winning Primary School in County Durham last summer. Scolarest, which has been providing lunchtime catering services at the school since 1994, was keen to help, but needed to establish demand, what parents wanted their children to be offered and how much they were prepared to pay.
Working with the school, Scolarest produced a questionnaire for parents of all 230 pupils to discover if they were interested in a breakfast service and asking them to tick what their child would choose from a priced sample menu. Between 35 and 50 children a day, plus a handful of parents, have regularly used the breakfast service since it was launched last autumn. Running from 8.20 to 9am each day in the school dining hall, it offers a menu choice of sausage bun (30p), cereal and milk (30p), beans or spaghetti on toast (30p), toast and jam (15p), yoghurt (20p), fresh fruit (15p), tea, coffee or hot chocolate (20p), and fresh fruit juice and milk (15p).
Positive effects
Parents have given the service a definite thumbs-up. "Some say their children won't have breakfast at home but will have it at school where they can sit and eat with their friends," Scolarest operations manager Kathleen Smith says. Some mothers and fathers - especially those dropping children off early before work - like being able to leave their children in the warmth and safety of the school dining hall.
Head teacher Patricia Bateley has also seen positive effects. "We've noticed that the children are more attentive in the morning session. They are being nourished and it has definitely led to an improvement in their concentration. They are a lot more focused."
So far, the service has been so successful that Scolarest has not needed to adopt any special marketing ploys to encourage take-up. "Numbers have slipped slightly since we started now the service is no longer a novelty, but they're coming back up now and we regularly have up to 40 children a day eating breakfast at the school, plus up to five parents," Smith says.
Extra staffing costs - often what deters a school meals provider from offering breakfast - have been avoided by rearranging staff hours. Two members of the school's four-strong catering team operate the breakfast service - one working for an hour from 8am to 9am before going home and returning to cover the lunchtime service. The other staff member stays at the school and works right through the morning and lunch.
New products and further information
* Among the food products recently launched into catering are individual frozen rosti potato cakes from McCain and traditional English breakfast in a hand-held pastry case from Apetito.
The following suppliers have more information on breakfast products
Apetito 01225 555900
Brake Bros 0845 606 9090
Freshbake Foods 0161-868 6847
Kellogg's 0800 783 6676
McCain 01723 584141
Quaker Foodservice 020 8574 2388
Weetabix Catering 01536 722181
