Your order’s up for all-day breakfast
McDonald’s will finally offer Egg McMuffins after 11 a.m. at 1,100 locations across Canada
All-day breakfast at McDonald’s will launch in Canada on Feb. 21, more than a year after it was rolled out in the U.S., boosting restaurant traffic and sales.
“It is really in response to the No. 1question that I’ve been asked since the United States introduced all-day breakfast: When is all-day breakfast coming to Canada?” said John Betts, president and chief executive officer for McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada Ltd.
The all-day breakfast menu will be rolled out at 1,100 locations after testing in the GTA last year and, more recently, at locations in Vancouver and Montreal.
“Really, we knew we were going to do this, we knew it had appeal. What we were testing, really, was the operational aspects — how do you incorporate it into the system,” Betts said.
Doug Fisher, president of the Toronto food service consultancy FHG International Inc., said McDonald’s is trying harder than ever to innovate in order to improve its financial performance.
“It’s a brilliant idea. It’s 20 years late in the making — they should have done it long ago, but it’s a great idea,” Fisher said.
“I think there will be much more (innovation) to come in the future.”
The food retailer said it is conducting a small pilot test in Florida to see whether home delivery could be viable and is also testing an order-ahead system, using the Internet or an app.
The announcement arrives on the heels of the company’s full-year earnings report on Monday.
While global comparable sales at McDonald’s restaurants were up 2.7 per cent for the quarter and 3.8 per cent for the year, comparable sales were down 1.3 per cent for the quarter in the U.S., in part because the launch of all-day breakfast a year earlier drove up sales so much.
Comparable sales measures the increase in sales at restaurants that have been operating for more than a year. Canada is a consistently strong performer in the global chain.
Breakfast, anchored by McDonald’s coffee and the popular Egg McMuffin combos, has been driving growth for eight to nine years in Canada, Betts said.
Betts said Canada is launching allday breakfast after the U.S. in part because it had been in the middle of a foundational change. That change included introducing self-serve kiosks, adding new equipment for McCafé espresso offerings, introducing McCafé pastries, and hiring and training more than 6,000 employees to provide hospitality for diners, including greeting them and helping them at the kiosks.
Up to $13,000 per location was spent to add new equipment to handle the all-day breakfast menu, including toasters and separate freshcracked egg cookers, separate from the grills where chicken and beef are cooked.
McDonald’s has 1,450 restaurants in Canada.
The 350 locations not offering allday breakfasts were too small to upgrade, Betts said.
Betts said all-day breakfast appeals to consumers who don’t eat beef or chicken.
The Egg McMuffin is the most popular item on the breakfast menu.
Betts said he doesn’t know whether the menu expansion might work in the other direction, with hamburgers and other lunchtime items being offered in the morning.
“Who knows? I think it will be the guest who tells us,” Betts said.