Breakfast is still a possibility, Wendy’s says

Wendy’s has not ruled out an entry into the breakfast market, according to CEO Emil Brolick.

“Oh, no,” Brolick responded after being asked during a Bloomberg Television interview if Wendy’s would sit out the fast-food breakfast wars. “If you look at the breakfast day part, it continues to be one of the strongest growing day parts in quick serve restaurants."

But “if we entered it again sometime in the future we would do it in a way that would separate us apart and differentiate it,” Brolick said.

Wendy’s scrapped a year-long breakfast test in spring 2013.  It offered breakfast during the late 1980s but retreated from the morning market because of operational problems with the ambitious made-to-order menu.

“It's very difficult to enter that space today and commit the kind of marketing resources that we feel would be necessary to really entrench ourselves successfully,” Brolick said during the interview. “And also do it in a way that we can not just break even, but make a good amount of money, because we are going to ask our teams to work hard and spend extra time in our restaurants, we want to make sure that we can do that in a highly profitable basis.

“We felt based upon our last learning that we weren't quite there.”

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