Oh god, this is the third week in a row that I’m talking about fast food. The fast food news starts coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and th-
Wendy’s has joined all the other fast food giants in serving breakfast. More on potentially why later.
(And sorry to disappoint, but after the KFC Donut Sandwich and smuggling in a Sonic chili dog to see Sonic the Hedgehog, I don’t think my body could handle taste-testing one of everything on the Wendy’s breakfast menu.)
At first glance, it seems like a typical fast food breakfast menu. All different combinations of egg, cheese, bacon or sausage on either biscuits, croissants or rolls, with a few chicken sandwiches thrown in because hey, that’s the big trendy thing in fast food these days. Perplexingly, the croissant sandwiches arbitrarily have a swiss cheese sauce on them while the rest have sliced cheese. Most alarmingly, the Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit has a giant glob of honey butter on it.
I initially got a little excited for their flagship offering, the Breakfast Baconator, because it seemed like a fast food place was finally going all in and making a breakfast burger. This would make sense for them, being Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers after all. But on closer inspection, the revolution was a lie (it’s sausage). Why is no one trying to make a breakfast burger? Do people think a burger would be too “heavy” for breakfast? As if a fried chicken sandwich covered in butter wouldn’t be?
I’m also having a hard time figuring out those eggs. In the official pictures, it looks like a sad egg patty like the ones I used to microwave back when I worked at Dunkin Donuts. But in most fan pictures on Twitter, it looks like an actual egg (some even say the yolk is still runny, which normally I’d want in an egg, but for some reason I don’t think I’d want that from fast food)
There’s also something called a Frosty-cino (iced coffee mixed with vanilla or chocolate Frosty mix over ice) and- oh god, I’m having Garfaccino flashbacks. Can we please stop putting -cino on the end of things?
Other menu offerings include potato wedges, which seem like a logical next step in the evolution of fast food breakfast potatoes, and sausage gravy and biscuits, which, if it’s anything like Wendy’s chili, is probably made with leftover sausage patties that have been sitting in the warmer for too long.
The consumer reaction seems to be overall positive, with some taking to the hashtag #wendysbreakfastbattle to try to stir up another Popeyes/Chick-fil-A rivalry. There’s probably enough material about this level of brand loyalty for an entire stand-alone article.
Speaking of Twitter, several users have pointed out that this may all be a ploy to cover up the fact that Wendy’s Chairman of the Board, Nelson Peltz, just held a $10 million fundraiser for Trump’s reelection, and that the new menu’s official release date of the day before Super Tuesday seems too coincidental to not be politically charged. This news isn’t particularly new, however, as it turns out most fast food chains are donating to Trump’s re-election campaign. It’s almost as if fast food chains profit from keeping poor people poor, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, et cetera et cetera.
(If you want a more centrist, “in the interest of fairness” take, some of the evidence in said article is said to be shaky- ie: some Darden Group executives donate to Trump, but others have made similar donations to the DNC.)
Most interestingly, Wendy’s has tried to do breakfast before- once in 1985 and once in 2007. So, who knows how well this attempt is gonna go. Maybe Twitter hype is the secret ingredient to making it last.
