Marie Sallie, director of off-premise business development at Sunny Street Cafe
Marie Swallie does not mind coming in early.
“My team and I are used to coming at 2 in the morning to prepare breakfast-catering orders,” said the director of off-premise business development at Sunny Street Café in an interview. “Just this morning we had a breakfast burrito and sandwich order for several hundred people from a construction company that was due at 6 a.m. I don’t mind. I like getting up early and we have a lot of coffee in the restaurant.”
If breakfast-catering trends continue to percolate, those coffee pots will get a lot of use.
One explanation for the rise in breakfast catering is America’s gradual return to office. In ezCater’s recent Food for Work report, 86 percent of respondents said free food would encourage them to come to the workplace, and 50 percent said a free-food perk would convince them to accept a job offer.
“We’re seeing 5 to 10 percent year-over-year growth in breakfast catering in our downtown locations,” Swallie said, noting the diversity of employers making orders, from schools wanting to satisfy its teachers to hospitals wanting to satiate its doctors to law firms wanting to fuel its attorneys.
The pandemic played a big role accelerating off-premises orders for the brand, said Swallie.
“We’ve had high demand ever since as companies still want to create a good atmosphere for employees and clients,” she said.
Suffice to say that creating a good atmosphere requires more from a manager than stopping at a donut shop and bring in crullers. Maybe that used to cut it. But it’s no longer 1995.
“Breakfast catering was an untapped market for a long time,” she said. “But now the growth area is hot food, like burritos and breakfast sandwiches.”
To absorb the newfound intensity of orders, Sunny Street Cafe has upgraded its tech stack.
“We have invested in some new programs that have helped make the ordering process seamless,” she said.
She notes how important this is for young consumers, for whom digital ordering is second nature, and who are important gatekeepers in workplace ordering.
“A lot of them are in charge of ordering for their group,” she said.
Sunny Street Café’s catering revenues come from a mix of regulars and first-time customers.
“We have core clients who love to use us on repeat, such as radio stations that have morning breakfast meetings, and new folks,” she said.
The brand is happy to accommodate anyone willing to dial its number or punch in an online order. It doesn’t need that much notice.
“We offer 24/7 catering,” she said. “Mind you most of the time people don’t call you at 3 a.m. Those orders usually come in the night before. But we do our best to oblige everyone.”
Famous Toastery senses an opportunity
Famous Toastery is also riding the hot-food breakfast catering wave. It operates 24 locations, mostly in the Carolinas. It’s a scratch kitchen. Dishes like its Portobello Mushroom Benedict take time to prepare. But that doesn’t mean it can’t fulfill catering orders in a timely fashion.
Mike Sebazco, president of Famous Toastery
“Our breakfast catering started with a couple franchisees trying it out on their own for off-site orders and doing a good job with it,” said Mike Sebazco, president of Famous Toastery, in an interview. “We asked ourselves if this was incremental to our business or taking away from our dine-in business, and in 2023 we decided we needed a robust breakfast-catering program.”
It knew it was going to sell a lot of dishes with eggs and when it comes to catering, dishes with eggs can be tricky. But it figured out what it does best.
“We don’t do poached or over medium but bulk to go,” he said. “The eggs are either going to be scrambled or over hard on a sandwich.”
Plus there are safety concerns.
“There is a four-hour food-safety zone regulation,” he said. “You can hot-box things and hold them at temp but once you manufacture you’re at a four-hour window.”
Famous Toastery is a small brand compared to Panera and other breakfast-catering category leaders. But its program has fully arrived.
“We can feed your office tomorrow morning with just a little notice,” he said. “But that took some time.”
Those orders are now feeding its bottom line.
“Year to date our catering is 6 percent of our sales. Last year it was 3 ½ percent,” he said. “It also represents about 20 percent of our third-party delivery sales.”
Famous Toastery recently launched its first loyalty program and stands poised to excel in all manner of transactions. But whether it’s catering or dine-in, it keeps one thing front of mind.
“What we take from our dining room into our off-premises orders is our hospitality,” he said. “That’s core of what we do.”
