Why breakfast sandwiches rise and shine as cereal keeps losing steam

Once upon a nostalgic American time, breakfast was cereal.

A bowl, a spoon, and an increasingly sugary product shaken from a box spelled the morning meal for many a kid - or an adult whose habits were formed while slurping that pastel-tinted milk before shouldering a lumpy backpack to meet the school bus.

But no longer. Breakfast - for kids and their time-pressed parents — has been overtaken by a stealthy cereal killer. Behold the breakfast sandwich, the brashest phenomenon to hit the morning hours since the alarm clock, a phenomenon that has wound its way into our lives without us really even noticing.

Was there a time when breakfast sandwiches weren’t a thing? The format — typically, bagels, croissants, English muffins, biscuits or bread encasing some combination of eggs, cheese, and meat - wasn’t always so ubiquitous. But it’s the perfect, foil-wrapped encapsulation of our times.

To David Portalatin, food industry adviser to research firm Circana, the phenomenon of the breakfast sandwich juggernaut is the bread-encased embodiment of multiple trends in the way people are eating. Chief among them is portability; more than ever, consumers want food on the go, maybe in the car on the way to school or at the office while scrolling through the morning's emails. Another is that protein is seen as a must in morning meals. Not everyone is on a keto diet, of course, but the idea that a healthy start to the day involves more than just carbs has now been baked into the collective consciousness.

"The breakfast sandwich has been a portable source of protein that is convenient and nutritious," Portalatin says. "That's been the biggest change in breakfast in the last 10 years."

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Across the board, from fast-food and convenience stores to groceries whose freezer and refrigerator cases are stocked with all kinds of options, sales of breakfast sandwiches have for years been steadily trending upward. This year, they were the fastest-growing item at fast-food restaurants, beating out staples such as chicken nuggets and burgers, and at convenience stores, too, according to data from Circana.

And at grocery and convenience stores — where they are sold frozen and in the deli — sales are up. Americans bought more than $2.4 billion of them in the year ending in September, up from almost $1.5 billion in 2019, according to NielsenIQ.

It wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, a cereal box - perhaps featuring a cartoonish mascot, or maybe your favorite Olympic athlete - dominated the breakfast table. But cereal's decline has been long and steep - and a table isn't even in the picture. Its demise hit an inflection point in 2016, when a study showed that millennials were eschewing it because they simply couldn't be bothered to wash the bowl and spoon. The category has fallen even further, with post-pandemic sales tanking, particularly because younger customers are no longer yoked to those milk-doused bowls.

Competition has come from other options, including plastic-wrapped protein bars and little tubs of Greek yogurt. Still, the breakfast sandwich has been the item to beat.

For that, blame fast food (at least partially). Breakfast generally is seen as a valuable chunk of "white space" for fast-food companies, which is industry jargon for an opportunity to capture more of consumers' dollars, Portalatin says. It might not be the final frontier ("fourth meal," anyone?), but the morning hours have been a focus for companies who have long been preoccupied with burgers.

Brands have been steadily upping their breakfast game with new menu items. Wendy's recently debuted a pair of English muffin sandwiches, which joined the company's already deep bench of morning options, which it overhauled and expanded to great fanfare in 2020. McDonald's has paired with Krispy Kreme to expand its lineup, and Dunkin' is experimenting with breakfast tacos.

Grocery brands, too, have their eye on the morning meal. Eric Smith, senior associate brand manager with Jimmy Dean focusing on sandwiches, notes that even as younger customers no longer adhere to the traditional pattern of three meals a day - instead preferring to snack, or space out meals - demand at breakfast remains consistent across demographics.

The brand, long known for its frozen sausage biscuits, has been expanding its lineup of sandwiches, in recent years adding such products as maple-griddle cakes and plant-based options to cater to the younger market. Convenience, Smith says, is king. “That’s the main driver of breakfast sandwiches, the overall ease,” Smith says. “Being able to take an item frozen — whether it’s getting in the car or bringing it to the office or school, and having it on the go - is the driver behind the success.”

Such portability, according to Peter Saleh, managing director and senior restaurant analyst with the financial-services firm BTIG, is increasingly important. The pandemic accelerated the trend away from fast-food in-store orders, he says, and now he estimates that about 80 percent of business is done from a car. "Almost all the demand is going through the drive-through," he says. "When you have that dynamic, people are not sitting down, so they need something they can hold with one hand."

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But fast food drive-throughs and convenience-store coolers aren't the only places where breakfast sandwiches are proliferating faster than a microwave on high power. Higher-end eateries staffed by pedigreed chefs are taking the humble format to artisanal heights. Of course, New Yorkers have long enjoyed a special relationship with their "BEC" (bacon, egg and cheese), usually stuffed in a roll and bought at a corner market. But now diners can find iterations such as Thai Diner's roti-wrapped, basil-spiked version or a pain de mie with tomato confit at Rigor Hill Market.

At Loaf Lounge, a breadcentric cafe in Chicago, Ben Lustbader applies skills he honed at high-end restaurants to the roster of breakfast sandwiches on the menu. He makes the capicola and sausage in house, trains his staff to cook eggs to the exact right stage of runny yolk, and obsesses over condiments, including a fig mostarda and a herby mayonnaise that he concedes has "way too many ingredients" to be entirely practical.

Making sandwiches is no longer something many chefs sees as beneath them — Lustbader describes a vibrant “breakfast sandwich scene” in the Windy City — and he embraces the high/low mash-up. “Some people might think of breakfast sandwiches as drive-through or bodega food, and honestly, I don’t see a big division between what I’m doing and that,” he says. “It’s fine either way. Someone might just smash one on the way to work, or you can serve it to someone who will sit and appreciate the care that went into making it.”

The breakfast sandwich's origin story, though, has little to do with the kind of sous vide eggs or microgreens you might find at one of the new chic all-day restaurants popping up across over the country. The staple was born, first in London, and later across the pond, alongside industrialization, allowing workers heading to factories or laying railroad tracks to grab a convenient and filling meal to start their days.

In 1971, McDonald's introduced the Egg McMuffin, which has become America's most iconic example of the genre. According to company lore, the McMuffin was invented by a California franchisee who wanted to capture the flavors of eggs Benedict in a fast-food format. He substituted Hollandaise sauce with American cheese, and used a ring on a griddle to contain the eggs in a tidy disc. Again, the breakfast sandwich's fate intertwined with that of the working class; its runaway popularity dovetailed with a dramatic increase in most Americans' work hours.

If history proves right, and as goes the American worker, so goes our breakfast? Well, it seems we’ll be taking that sandwich to go.