Wendy's (NASDAQ: WEN) now serves breakfast food nationwide, with items including the Breakfast Baconator and Frosty-ccino. The full breakfast menu includes nine sandwiches offered on croissants, biscuits, and buns.
Wendy's fully intends to capitalize on the popularity of fast food breakfast, considering that breakfast has represented 16% of traffic at fast food establishments over the past year. According to Wendy's, their nationwide breakfast sales could end up accounting for 10% of daily sales.
When it comes to Wendy's marketing campaign, it's strategic, calculated, and deliberately directed at winning over McDonald's (NYSE: MCD) breakfast fans. "It has been game-planned to death," said Wendy's CEO Todd Penegor, referring to the breakfast launch.
In a competitive marketing battle that's been popularly referred to as the "breakfast wars," Wendy's has been challenging McDonald's on social media for months, and they're not done yet. In fact, Wendy's plans to spend between $70 million and $80 million this year on advertising that targets McDonald's customers, according to Wendy's CFO Gunter Plosch.
McDonald's has noticed and responded to Wendy's efforts, not turning away so easily. "We have to win at breakfast," McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski told analysts. "There's obviously a lot of focus and attention that we're going to be putting on that in 2020."
To compete with Wendy's breakfast launch, McDonald's announced that March 2 is "National Egg McMuffin Day." On March 2, the day of Wendy's nationwide breakfast roll out, McDonald's customers were able to get a free Egg McMuffin between 6:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. through the McDonald's mobile app.
In addition to McDonald's, other competition in the fast food breakfast realm includes the privately-owned Chick-fil-A, Dunkin' Donuts (NASDAQ: DNKN), whose parent company Dunkin' Brands also runs Baskin-Robbins, and Panera Bread, which went private in 2017 in a roughly $7.5 billion deal with JAB Holding. IHOP, owned by Dine Brands Global (NYSE: DIN), has even announced plans to roll out Flip'd, a new store that will offer made-to-order breakfasts available to go.
Previously, Wendy's offered some breakfast items at select locations. Now, their nationwide launch is growing breakfast offerings from about 300 locations to the chain's roughly 6,000 locations across the country.
Wendy's expects to spend roughly $20 million hiring about 20,000 new employees in order to make this move work.