McDonald’s is trying to extend the fanfare over its all-day breakfast menu by adding the McGriddle at another 1,000 locations.
The chain says some restaurants in Southern states will start offering the breakfast sandwich made with syrupy pancake buns around the clock starting Monday. McDonald’s had already been testing the addition of the McGriddle in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and executives have said the company is looking at the feasibility of offering a full breakfast menu all day.
When all-day breakfast was launched nationally in October, restaurants offered only select items since breakfast foods require their own equipment and grill space. Offering a full breakfast menu all day would mean “looking at what needs to come off the menu” to maintain operational simplicity, McDonald’s Chief Financial Officer Kevin Ozan has said.
A McDonald’s spokeswoman, Becca Hary, said the company will “continue to evolve the all-day breakfast menu,” but that there were no confirmed plans to expand all-day breakfast across its more than 14,000 U.S. locations. She said select stores in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina were adding the McGriddle next week.
McDonald’s Corp. is fighting to turn around its business under CEO Steve Easterbrook, who took over a little more than a year ago. For the fourth quarter, the chain said sales jumped 5.7 percent at established U.S. locations, marking its best showing since early 2012.
Still, the chain has a long way to go. For 2015, customer visits in the U.S. slipped 3 percent at established locations. That followed a 4.1 percent drop the previous year.
The rollout of all-day breakfast, which McDonald’s says was the top customer request in recent years, has been the highest-profile move under Easterbrook. The Oak Brook, Illinois-based company has said the move helped bring back customers who hadn’t been to a McDonald’s in a while. Others were tacking on breakfast items onto their lunch orders, Ozan said during the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Consumer & Retail Tech Conference last week.
“So, believe it or not, you may find some people ordering a lunch entree and ordering an Egg McMuffin sandwich as an add-on,” he said.
Associated Press
