You thought you knew breakfast, didn't you? Eggs and bacon, coffee and toast. Well, think again. Paul Daly says it is time to view breakfast in a whole new way, and as assistant VP of food & beverage for Hyatt Hotels Corporation, he is out to prove it.

“If you think about our guests, the one meal where we see them most often is breakfast. Yet, as a company we have never really tackled the breakfast meal period,” Daly says.

A new breakfast program has rolled out in Hyatt properties nationwide. Customers are eating it up, as it were, and chefs say it has brought a new level of excellence to the morning meal. “The quality is undeniable,” says Susan Terry, senior executive chef at the Grand Hyatt Washington.

The Signature Breakfast program distinguishes itself first with a diverse menu of unusual offerings, including French toast made from a sticky bun and a poached-egg casserole dish. Other specialties include pancakes topped with bananas, raspberries, and syrup; corned beef hash with poached eggs and chipotle sauce; and “Breakfast in a Basket” featuring a bacon-and-cheddar fried egg sandwich served with roasted fingerling potatoes.

In addition to pushing the menu well beyond cold cereal and muffins, the program also puts new emphasis on the interpersonal side, encouraging servers to interact more directly with their clientele. This means, for instance, the offer of a French press coffee service, prepared tableside by the server.

Interactivity also includes a two-ounce breakfast smoothie served in a shot glass, compliments of the chef. This unlikely item has been a runaway success so far. “Everybody was very leery in the beginning, but it's a value-added item, nobody else does it, and 90 percent of the customers are trying it and enjoying it,” says Fred Hoffman, executive assistant manager of food & beverage, and senior food & beverage director at the 966-room Hyatt Regency Jacksonville, which averages about 200 breakfasts a day.

At the same time, he says, the smoothie helps wake people up to the idea of breakfast as a special meal. “A lot of people just don’t pay attention to breakfast. As long as you have your omelets, your bacon and sausage, that’s all the attention people pay to it.”

Not just a crowd pleaser, the smoothie also serves as an indirect revenue enhancer. “It helps you to add an extra dollar here or there on your a la carte items,” Hoffman says. “There is a perceived value if you give something away.”

Still, that kind of initiative comes with a price. At 6 million breakfasts a year, the smoothies represent “a significant investment,” Daly says, adding that Hyatt likely will invest some $1 million in the smoothie program.

Consensus Effort
Daly did not just serve up the new breakfast program on a platter. He worked closely with F&B executives from throughout the organization to ensure an end product that would work not just in the test kitchen but also out in the field.

Ten senior chefs and 10 senior F&B directors were asked to think about a new look and feel for breakfast. They bunked at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, the chain’s flagship property, and for two and a half days they cooked and talked.

“The mindset was, we are going to take traditional breakfast items and give them an innovative spin,” Daly says. They searched for 15 breakfast items that would work across all hotels. Beyond that, “we let democracy rule.”

Next came a month-long beta test in six hotels—different property types of different sizes—where chefs and managers experimented Poached egg casserole dish. with the new ideas. Daly visited all theseproperties and spoke not just to the staff but also to customers.

There was a casualty early on. The breakfast pizza was just too complex to prepare.

Finally in mid-June 2005 Daly invited every F&B director, every catering director, and every executive chef to a series of meetings in San Francisco to train them up: how to make it, how to train their staffs, what the menu looks like.

Implementation might have been dicey. Daly said he was unsure of his ability to elicit buy-in from local managers, many of whom wanted to know that they would still be free to make necessary decisions over their own menus. To resolve the possible tension, it was decided to build in some latitude.

“We gave them the 15 signature items that they have to carry, but we told them they can also carry four of their own, so if they have regional dishes they can be as creative as they want with that aspect,” Daly says.

That effort apparently paid off. When the breakfast concept rolled out across the chain on August 15, managers reported in with 100 percent compliance.

Daly credits the methodical development process with pushing the success of the initial effort. “Taking the time to roll it out right, to go through the process, to make sure we have available product: All of that was huge," he says.

A Good Thing Better
Let's be clear about something. There was nothing wrong with Hyatt's breakfast before all this. It served its purpose, giving guests the caffeine- and-carbs fix they needed to get through their busy day. It’s just that there was nothing special about it, nothing to make it stand out from hundreds of other hotel breakfasts. Nor was it particularly consistent from one property to another.

The refurbishment was more than just an effort to spruce up the menu. “It really speaks to Hyatt’s strategic move,” says Daly. “We want to have a reputation of having the best breakfast in the country.”

There are a lot of ways to do that. You can redecorate the room or rearrange the menu. You can swap out the china, too. But Daly took a different approach. He says it was important to start with the food. “Flavor is somewhat of a lost art. We have gotten so caught up as chefs and F&B executives in how things look, we have forgotten that things have to taste good first.”

For Terry in Washington, this has meant not just implementing the new menu items, but also making sure that what goes into those items is as good as it can be. “We’ve really made a decision to focus on purchasing and procuring the best quality that we can get our hands on, from the bacon and sausage to the fruit. The specs on it are just unbelievable,” she says.

To find these items, Terry relies on an outside procurement company, not to do the buying but to identify potential providers.

The new menu and new approach have pushed her costs higher, but Terry says she is finding ways to offset the increases. “Bacon alone is one of my top five food spends, and while we have definitely increased our cost we also have been able to adjust our pricing to keep up with that changing cost,” she says. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Those adjustments in pricing throughout the chain already have mounted up, with breakfast revenues this fall up about 12 percent year over year. “From the financial side we are happy,” Daly says. Some properties have seen even bigger improvements. In Jacksonville, for instance, Fred Hoffman says the average breakfast check is up 20–25 percent.

In fact, it was in Jacksonville that Daly first got a hint of the potential of the new breakfast program.

“The first morning we started doing the breakfast smoothie I will never forget. We had four businessmen come in their ties and suits,” he recalls. “The server thought: that’s not the guy who wants a breakfast smoothie.” He brought the drinks anyway. The suits slurped them down and loved them.

“It really sent a clear message to me this was something that was going to be very successful,” Daly says. “The customer response we have gotten has been incredibly supportive.”

Adam Stone is a frequent contributor to HOTEL F&B EXECUTIVE.