# Breakfast at Fast Food Places **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 26, 2008, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756 "2008-12-26T18:24:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![SharkB8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@SharkB8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SharkB8)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/1 "2008-12-26T18:24:28Z")
Why don’t places like McDonald’s and Burger King offer their breakfast items all day long? I’m just thinking I’m down for some hash browns any time of day. There might be a demand there. Is it more expensive to offer breakfast or something? ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/2 "2008-12-26T18:29:53Z")
Basically because the equipment needs to be set differently. The temps on the grills and so forth. They can’t do both at the same time. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/3 "2008-12-26T18:38:07Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Basically because the equipment needs to be set differently. The temps on the grills and so forth. They can’t do both at the same time. What he said. Although Burger King offers (or used to offer) burgers at any time of the day. You may remember the “Burgers for Breakfast” ad campaign. So obviously it’s not an unworkable issue if they really want to do it. I don’t know if it’s different now but back in the day when I worked for McDonalds some 15 years ago, we had a separate grill we rolled out for the hotcakes. It was cumbersome and a real bitch to clean but at least it wasn’t taking up burger cooking space. There’s been persistant rumors that McDonald’s will offer breakfast all day long. Google “McDonald’s all day breakfast” and you’ll find a bunch of links stating either that “all day breakfast” is on the horizon or else that it’ll never ever be. These go back to 2006 or earlier so I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting on a dinner-time Egg McMuffin. ---
**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/4 "2008-12-26T18:56:25Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > What he said. Although Burger King offers (or used to offer) burgers at any time of the day. You may remember the “Burgers for Breakfast” ad campaign. So obviously it’s not an unworkable issue if they really want to do it. I don’t know if it’s different now but back in the day when I worked for McDonalds some 15 years ago, we had a separate grill we rolled out for the hotcakes. It was cumbersome and a real bitch to clean but at least it wasn’t taking up burger cooking space. > > There’s been persistant rumors that McDonald’s will offer breakfast all day long. Google “McDonald’s all day breakfast” and you’ll find a bunch of links stating either that “all day breakfast” is on the horizon or else that it’ll never ever be. These go back to 2006 or earlier so I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting on a dinner-time Egg McMuffin. Burger King offers hamburgers all day because they char-broil the burgers. That means they aren’t frying them up on the griddle that’s being used for eggs and pancakes. Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s is in the same situation. By contrast, McDonald’s uses grills to prepare its burgers, so if it tries to run breakfast at the same time as burger-making, it gets difficult. Remember, too, that McDonald’s doesn’t prepare its patties one at a time; it prepares several at a time and then stores them in a warmer. This means using up the whole grill (or most of it) during burger preparation. I notice that Wendy’s has gone ahead in the last couple years with breakfasts, having tried once and failed miserably back in the 80s. From the looks of the list, the items involve minimal grilling/frying. ---
**Author:** ![pkd88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/2bfe46/32.png) [@pkd88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkd88)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/5 "2008-12-26T19:02:51Z")
I am pretty sure Jack in the Box does breakfast all day. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/6 "2008-12-26T19:10:57Z")
> [@DSYoungEsq](#): > > Burger King offers hamburgers all day because they char-broil the burgers. That means they aren’t frying them up on the griddle that’s being used for eggs and pancakes. Makes sense. Good point. ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/7 "2008-12-26T19:24:43Z")
White Castle does burgers anytime, which was great when I worked overnights. White Castle had a pretty sad breakfast menu. I remember their sandwhich was an egg on toast. Big deal LOL ---
**Author:** ![Kevbo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e47774/32.png) [@Kevbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kevbo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/8 "2008-12-26T19:28:10Z")
Beef drippings/grease from the grill give eggs a nasty taste…at least if you are used to bacon or sausage flavor they usually pick up. …so if you have been cooking burgers on the grill, you need to clean it up pretty well before starting the eggs. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/9 "2008-12-26T22:26:01Z")
> [@SharkB8](#): > > Why don’t places like McDonald’s and Burger King offer their breakfast items all day long? Your name’s not Bill Foster, is it? ---
**Author:** ![Glazer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a88e57/32.png) [@Glazer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Glazer)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/10 "2008-12-26T22:36:00Z")
> [@Kevbo](#): > > Beef drippings/grease from the grill give eggs a nasty taste…at least if you are used to bacon or sausage flavor they usually pick up. ..so if you have been cooking burgers on the grill, you need to clean it up pretty well before starting the eggs. Not just taste.burgers will make eggs stick to the grill. Places that sell breakfast all day, a.k.a. Waffle House make ther eggs in pans. ---
**Author:** ![BrandonR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/779978/32.png) [@BrandonR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrandonR)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/11 "2008-12-26T23:02:22Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Basically because the equipment needs to be set differently. The temps on the grills and so forth. They can’t do both at the same time. This. I remember watching a documentary about McDonald’s and they specifically noted that the reason they didn’t serve breakfast all day long was because the eggs they cook (yes, they surprisingly do cook their own eggs) require a much lower griddle temperature than the burgers require. That said, places like Jack in the Box serve it all day so what do they do differently? On a mild hijack, didn’t McDonald’s switch the time they stop serving breakfast from 10:30 to 11? I could have sworn they did but I was greeted with disappointment when I visited and found they had indeed stopped serving at 10:30. ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/12 "2008-12-26T23:11:39Z")
> [@Steven Wright](#): > > I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time”. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance! Burp. ---
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/13 "2008-12-26T23:14:19Z")
> [@BrandonR](#): > > That said, places like Jack in the Box serve it all day so what do they do differently? They charge more. Labor is a tremendous part of the cost for any fast-food restaurant. The wider variety of food you serve, the more people you have available to serve it. Serving breakfast all day means they have to continally make all ingredients available (i.e., thawed out, prepped, chopped, whatever) at all hours. It would also mean they have to run multiple cooking stations at various temperatures, or find a way to simplify — I dunno, perhaps during off-peak breakfast hours they use something like a sandwich press to quick-cook a small batch of eggs for their I Am Jack’s Aorta breakfast sandwich. Jack-in-the-Box also has a large number of EZ-cuk items that can be kept frozen and deep fried in vegetable oil — fries, chicken, fish, egg rolls, tacos, mozzarella sticks, or whatever. This saves a bit on labor cost. ---
**Author:** ![JKilez](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e5b9ba/32.png) [@JKilez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKilez)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2008, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/14 "2008-12-26T23:19:48Z")
> [@BrandonR](#): > > This. I remember watching a documentary about McDonald’s and they specifically noted that the reason they didn’t serve breakfast all day long was because the eggs they cook (yes, they surprisingly do cook their own eggs) require a much lower griddle temperature than the burgers require. That said, places like Jack in the Box serve it all day so what do they do differently? Well apparently they used to get away with it by using those colder griddles all day long. [Linky](http://www.billmarler.com/key_case/jack-in-the-box-e-coli-outbreak/) and winky 😉 ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/15 "2008-12-27T01:49:12Z")
When I worked at McDonald’s, none of the reasons brought up in this thread applied, yet we still stopped serving breakfast (at 10:30 during the week, 11:00 on the weekends, **BrandonR** , perhaps that’s what happened to you?). We didn’t have a hotcake grill, ours were frozen and microwaved. The burger grill was used for sausages, but we had two of those (nominally one was for regular patties and one for quarter pounders), and one was almost always free at any particular moment. We had another grill that was used for eggs in the morning and grilled chicken during the day, and I don’t ever remember them changing the temperature. The biscuit oven was the same temperature for pies. Ditto hash browns/fries. Also, the end of breakfast/beginning of lunch was the one of the busiest times of day. The labor costs of transitioning seemed higher due to this. Managers had to overlap shifts during the changeover to keep up with orders while also cleaning up breakfast and switching over the kitchen to lunch. Is there a McDonald’s policy that no franchisee can serve breakfast all day? My store’s owner was fairly smart; he already allowed customers to order lunch food during breakfast. If he could have made more money serving breakfast all day, he would have. ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/16 "2008-12-27T01:49:27Z")
> [@BrandonR](#): > > (yes, they surprisingly do cook their own eggs) Sometimes. The “egg patty” they put on the Egg McMuffin and similar sammiches is real egg, cooked in a round form on the grill. However, the folded eggs they use for most other egg-containing products is some sort of premix liquid egg product. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/17 "2008-12-27T02:05:06Z")
> [@Q.E.D](#): > > Sometimes. The “egg patty” they put on the Egg McMuffin and similar sammiches is real egg, cooked in a round form on the grill. However, the folded eggs they use for most other egg-containing products is some sort of premix liquid egg product. The liquified eggs are real eggs, too. Just pre-scrambled. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/18 "2008-12-27T02:20:05Z")
There was no practical reason why the McDonalds I worked at many years ago couldn’t have served breakfast all day. The Hotcake grill just got turned off and had a cover put over it, the muffin toaster machine got wheeled out the back, and we flicked a switch on the grills to switch them to “burger patty” cooking. The store wasn’t extraordinarily busy and we worked out that we could easily keep offering breakfast all day (we had a spare grill that wasn’t being used for anything most of the time), and that there was a lot of demand for all-day breakfast (the store was in a tourist area with lots of staff and tourists keeping odd hours). A request was even put through to head office to see if we could run “All-day breakfast” on a trial basis, but the answer came back “No, because if you do it, people are going to go to other McDonalds stores and get annoyed that they aren’t doing it.” :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/19 "2008-12-27T02:21:39Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > The liquified eggs are real eggs, too. Just pre-scrambled. Eh, no. The product is apparently called PWE. Oh, it [contains](http://www.dietfacts.com/html/nutrition-facts/mcdonalds-mcskillet-burr51314.htm) real eggs, but that’s a far cry from _being_ real eggs. > [@](#): > > Scrambled Eggs (PWE=Powdered Whole Eggs): > Pasteurized whole eggs with sodium acid pyrophosphate, citric acid and monosodium phosphate (all added to preserve color), nisin (preservative). Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservative), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color). > CONTAINS: EGG, SOY LECITHIN. ---
**Author:** ![mshar253](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@mshar253](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mshar253)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756/20 "2008-12-27T03:35:56Z")
Sonic offers their entire menu all day. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/breakfast-at-fast-food-places/478756.md?page=2)