Editor’s note: This article has been updated with additional information on the breakfast pilot from Portillo’s.
Dive Brief:
- Portillo’s will begin serving a breakfast menu for the first time on April 15 at five pilot locations in Chicagoland, the company said in a press release emailed to Restaurant Dive.
- Breakfast will be served from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. daily at these locations for dine-in, drive-thru and takeout. An end date for the pilot is not yet determined, but it will last at least through summer, a spokesperson said.
- The breakfast test is part of the fast casual chain’s strategic approach to base menu innovation on consumer demand.
Dive Insight:
If the pilot proves successful, breakfast could be a lucrative daypart for Portillo’s, especially as the chain struggles with traffic growth. Other brands have seen breakfast rapidly become an important sales driver. Shortly after Wendy’s expanded into breakfast in 2020, its morning daypart made up 8% of sales in Q2 2020 and continued to drive sales momentum to the present. Wendy’s is also devoting more advertising dollars to the daypart, where it will add additional products later this year.
Portillo’s originally teased the breakfast test on April 1, posting a photo of a breakfast sandwich on social media. In addition to its breakfast items, Portillo’s will serve its Italian Beef Sandwich during the morning daypart. It also will offer Breakfast Meal Deals, which include a breakfast sandwich, small coffee and Hash Brown Bites for $7.99. It will also serve Chocolate Cake iced coffee and vanilla iced coffee from Metropolis Coffee, as well as Portillo’s Chocolate Cake Donut, which was created in collaboration with Stan’s Donuts.
In addition to extending operating hours to accommodate the new daypart, the chain said it worked with local personnel to ensure that the restaurants were staffed properly. Management also conducted additional training to make sure that teams were able to execute the breakfast menu with ease, a spokesperson said. The success of the test will be based on customer reactions, which the spokesperson said the chain takes seriously.
Portillo’s has been working to streamline its menu and cut low mix items in newer locations, but isn’t doing so in its Chicago restaurants, Michael Osanloo, Portillo’s CEO, said during the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call. In the newer locations, it has cut between 15% and 20% of SKUs from its menu, helping improve kitchen complexity, throughput and accuracy, The smaller menus help the chain move toward smaller locations, since it requires fewer ingredients to store in a cooler and freezer and less kitchen equipment.
Breakfast could help drive traffic, which will be a key focus for the chain this year. During Q4 2024, traffic was down 3.7%. Osanloo said he expects traffic to turn positive this year, especially with the addition of a loyalty program, which rolled out in March, that uses digital wallets instead of an app. The chain is leaning into kiosk expansion, and working to increase brand awareness outside of Chicago and improve operations in the drive-thru as part of this strategy.
