Across the country, Jennifer Vespole, most recently director of food service, QuickChek, Whitehouse Station, N.J., is likewise watching millennials change the breakfast strategy.
Core breakfast customer: “Largely white, 35 to 54 years old and split pretty evenly by gender. The Hispanic population in New Jersey is about 20%, and we may be slightly underindexing with this demographic.”
Core breakfast items: “Our core breakfast offer revolves around self-serve hot coffee, but our breakfast food is strong. Our strongest hot breakfast menu items are English muffin and burrito breakfast sandwiches made with sausage, egg and cheese or bacon, egg and cheese. We also sell a lot of buttered Portuguese and kaiser rolls in the a.m., which is unique to our market.” (Pictured here, QuickChek's bagel breakfast sandwich.)
Unique morning market-basket habits: “We know that the millennial population has a bigger propensity to want cold beverages in the a.m. They choose energy drinks and iced coffee over hot coffee.”
New releases for the morning: “We recently introduced an asiago bagel breakfast sandwich with pecan wood-smoked bacon and reintroduced chorizo as a breakfast meat option for our burritos. In the beverage area, we recently changed coffee roasters and are now locally roasting our fresh-brewed coffees. The coffee in our stores couldn’t be any fresher than it is today.”
"We know that the millennial population has a bigger propensity to want cold beverages in the a.m."