Ready for breakfast? Our Top 5 tips to supercharge your breakfast sales
Hannah Morter, Marketing, Category and Insight Management
5 July 2019
Did you know that 263 million breakfasts were eaten out of home last year (Kantar, 2018)? As our lives get more and more packed and working days longer, more and more of us are eating as we go and enjoying breakfast whilst we’re out and about. This provides a great chance for you to grow your sales!
Here are our 5 tips to help you maximise your breakfast sales success.
- Be Breakfast ready
Consumer demands change throughout the day and so make sure the range in your hot food counter accounts for this. The most popular breakfast products are baps, with 47% of people agreeing that baps are a suitable everyday breakfast (MCA, 2017), with bacon slightly more popular than sausage. Savoury turnovers and sweet pastries are also sought after. As we move into lunchtime, the demand for hot sandwiches increases, as well as burgers and savoury pastries. Our Food-to-Go concepts allow retailers to produce freshly prepared breakfast baps in the morning, and then burgers in the afternoon using many of the same ingredients, reducing freezer space requirements and simplifying the operation. Some products, such as sausage rolls and cheese & onion rolls have all-day appeal and so should be merchandised from first thing in the morning until late into the evening.
- Availability, availability, availability
Out of stock mean lost sales and damaged reputation. Research has shown that if a customer experiences the product they want out of stock three times or more, they will find an alternative supplier and not return to the store to purchase the product. This means that unreliable availability, as well as simply no availability, can seriously damage sales.
Breakfast is the fastest growing out of home dining occasion, growing +4.6% YoY (MCA, 2018), and so having product available for your customers as soon as you open in the morning is vital to success.
- Would you like a pastry with that?
At breakfast time, coffee link deals can be very lucrative. 58% of people buying a hot drink also want to purchase a cake or a pastry, and so utilising cross-category Point of Sale to communicate the offer can boost sales from both categories. Coffee sales peak in the morning and so linking with core breakfast products is a must, with Croissants, Pain au Chocolates and breakfast savouries working well.
- Grab their attention
Food is often bought with the eyes, and so make sure the product is packaged well and looks good enough to eat, literally! Using bright and clear shelf edge labels can grab customer attention as well as provide all legally required allergen information and pricing.
- Get scientific about your display
The exact position of your food, can make all the difference to sales. If you are a Country Choice customer you can make use of our range of planograms which show the best product and product positions for the best breakfast sales (plus planograms for other times of day). Whether you have access to planograms or not, it’s important to test and learn – track your sales performance against different product layouts, and continually improve your results.
So do you feel ready for breakfast?
Hopefully, with these hints and tips you feel ready to make the most of this great opportunity.
