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Fried bacon, eggs, sausage, toast, butter, and marmalade comprise the traditional English breakfast, croissants and café au lait in France, chocolates and churros in Spain, and muesli in Germany. For some in the U.S., it's cold pizza and a cola; for others, it's Sunday morning eggs and bacon, and for still others, only a strong cup of coffee will do. While opinions vary as to what constitutes the perfect breakfast food, the breaking of the fast remains a popular meal throughout the world.

What are you doing to capture your share of the breakfast business? You've merchandised your pasta accessories together with your imported pasta selections, coordinated cookware collections with gadgets and kitchen tools, and promoted Asian cooking in your cooking school, but when was the last time you made breakfast the focus of a merchandising theme or a cooking school class? By providing customers with solutions for breakfast just as you do for dinner, you'll soon realize how important breakfast can be to your bottom line.

Taking the Time for Breakfast

Kitchenware retailers are increasingly challenged to capture a share of the breakfast business, competing as they must with fast-food restaurants, coffee cafes, and bagel shops — but mostly with time — or, rather consumers' lack thereof.

An NPD Group study of 2,000 households containing 5,200 people found that 80 percent of breakfasts are made at home — albeit most participants reported being rushed when making it. Many consumers opt to pick up their breakfasts on the run because they just don't have time to prepare breakfast in the morning.

We've all heard it for years, "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," yet we shun the suggestion and either skip the meal completely, or grab something convenient, which is often not so healthful. In 1999, 87% of 18- to 24-year-olds skipped breakfast meals. In the 13- to 17- and 35- to 49-year-old age groups, 63% reported that they skip the breakfast meal.

These statistics don't necessarily mean that kitchenware retailers won't be able to provide solutions for their time-starved customers. Instead, they force retailers to truly understand their customers' needs and provide solutions for them. Entice your customers to take the time for breakfast by suggesting products that can make breakfast at home healthful, convenient, and fun.

Merchandising breakfast items together will induce customers to think about the meal, but what may really make them act on the urge is to highlight the convenience many products offer. Quick, convenient preparation of breakfast doesn't require a whole new set of kitchen utensils. It simply requires viewing a product in a whole new way. Hand blenders can prepare morning shakes and smoothies. Mini-choppers can quickly prepare the herbs and vegetables necessary for a delicious omelet. Besides quickly heating water for tea, electric kettles can heat water for instant oatmeal. Nonstick grilling surfaces with variable heat settings enable users to fry sausage or bacon on one side, and by simply flipping over the grill, a flat side is revealed on which to prepare pancakes, eggs, or French toast to complete the breakfast meal — all using one kitchen appliance. Finally, coffee maker technology enables users to preset their machines to brew coffee before or when they rise in the morning.

Consumers may be rushed during the week, but what many are realizing is that the weekend is the time to sit down with the family at either Saturday or Sunday breakfast. "Every night of the week, someone has something to do," said Renée Behnke of Sur La Table, "so they're realizing that on the weekends, the meal they can sit down and have together is weekend breakfast." That tendency can translate into increased sales, if breakfast products are merchandised properly. Following an increase in requests for items such as omelet or crepe pans, along with waffle irons and toasters, "we realized that our customers really were eating breakfast," said Behnke. To help customers fill all their breakfast needs, Sur La Table assembled a host of breakfast items together on one display rack. The array of products included bagel slicers, toast racks, and butter items from curlers to molds, to wire butter cutters, as well as an electric yogurt maker and yogurt strainer, egg cups galore from traditional to whimsical, and breakfast-related cookbooks.

Health & Breakfast

According to an analysis of USDA data by Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina, 22% of adults eat bread, English muffins, bagels, or similar items (without eggs or cereal); 17% eat cold cereal and milk (without eggs); 15% eat pastries and donuts and/or coffee or a soft drink; 6% eat just fruit or juice; 4% eat hot cereal; and 17% eat nothing. Not much of that sounds like a healthful way to start the day.

However, as Leslie Glover Pendleton, former food editor of Gourmet magazine, points out, "With ever-increasing health concerns, consumers are learning more about their diets and specifically, how a healthy breakfast can jump-start their metabolism in the morning."

Popkin's analysis of the USDA data also revealed that those who eat breakfast generally have better diets than those who choose not to do so. Of those breakfast eaters, cereal eaters are healthier than egg or pastry eaters.

Once again, a bit of knowledge about the way consumers think about their overall diets and how breakfast blends with their lifestyles can help retailers focus specific efforts on particular breakfast items. By keeping abreast of current research and hot diet trends, you can target your breakfast-related merchandising messages accordingly.

Ask yourself, "Which products might these customers require to prepare their breakfast meal?" Egg separators are a must for those watching their cholesterol. Fat separators are a natural for diet-conscious customers. Portion-control devices, kitchen scales that display caloric content, and all manner of peelers, corers, and slicers for fruits are additional items that health-conscious customers should find in your breakfast assortment.

The Breakfast Combos

Pancakes and sausage, eggs and bacon, fruit and waffles, coffee and pastries, cereal and milk, tea and scones . . . the list goes on and on, and so do the opportunities to promote these well-loved breakfast combinations, which can help guide your merchandising sets throughout the store.

Eggs, for example, are a breakfast tradition whose popularity surges and wanes according to popular diets or the most current research. After receiving a spate of bad press for its cholesterol properties, eggs are back in style for breakfast — from sunny-side up to poached or even soft-boiled.

Everything about eggs has been popular for a while now at Sur La Table. "Everything to do with eggs has been doing well," said Behnke. Egg cups — French, English, and otherwise, along with egg coddlers, egg timers, even egg piercers are strong sellers on Sur La Table's "Breakfast Rack."

And what goes better with eggs than bacon? While bacon was probably never on the "must-eat" list of dieters — except, of course, those partaking in the Atkins way, bacon has always been a popular breakfast item. And what cooks bacon better than cast iron? "Cast iron and bacon go together like peanut butter and jelly," said one manufacturer. The even heating and heat-retentive properties of cast iron cookware make it a perfect breakfast-time cooking utensil. Seek opportunities around your store to tell the story about your cooking utensils, from the heat-retentive properties that make cast iron a perfect breakfast skillet for eggs or even biscuits to the most appropriate whisk shape to scramble eggs, to the latest waffle makers that render preparation and cleanup a snap.

Just as a variety of kitchen tools can make breakfast preparation faster, so too can the wide variety of muffin, pancake, or bread mixes available. Cross-merchandise your kitchenware products with breakfast pantry essentials, from mixes to preserves. Display preserves alongside the crepe pans, syrup or honey with the pancake rings and griddle pans, even muffin mixes with muffin-topper pans and a cookbook about muffins. These cross-merchandising ideas might even prompt customers to purchase breakfast items, if not for themselves, as a gift for others.

On the Go

One of the hottest breakfast games in town is the portable food market, be it egg-wrap sandwiches offered at fast-food restaurants or grab-and-go pastry from the local coffee café. For those consumers who refuse to rise just 15 minutes earlier to prepare the day's most important meal, portable foods are the answer to their breakfast needs.

"Consumers haven't slowed down enough to make an entire breakfast feast every day," said Pendleton. "However, awareness is on the rise about the need to do something for breakfast, whether it's an egg sandwich or a breakfast bar."

If you think promoting your breakfast-related products to consumers of these portable foods is a lost cause, think again. A quick perusal of your store will make you soon realize that you have many products that can help customers consume breakfast on the go. Thermal carafes and to-go coffee mugs are almost no-brainers.

What about those customers who don't eat on the go, but eat at their destinations? Nearly one-quarter of children bring portable breakfast items with them to school and eat the meal at their morning destinations. Don't lose the opportunity to provide their parents with solutions for them as well. Reusable storage containers transport cereal, and a thermal carafe the milk, for example.

Plugged in for Breakfast

Perhaps the most well-known small kitchen appliance associated with breakfast is the coffee maker. Despite their complaints about not having time to eat breakfast at home, consumers have built the time into their mornings necessary to grab their morning coffees and bagels at the corner café. If they have time to park their cars and wait in lines at the café, then there is no reason they can't flip the button on the coffee maker and wait for the 12-minute brew cycle.

For those who can't, the pause-and-serve feature allows impatient consumers to sneak a cup during the brewing cycle — or for the truly on-the-go consumers, there's the brew-and-go machine that brews coffee into two individual thermal travel mugs.

Providing breakfast solutions to consumers doesn't end once the coffee makers are sold. Consider after-sale opportunities — grinders, bagged coffee, permanent gold-plated coffee filters, cups, and thermal mugs. According to data from the National Coffee Association's National Coffee Drinking Trends 2001, 64% of the coffee consumed every day is consumed at breakfast, and an additional 14% is consumed in the morning, but not at breakfast. Further, 75% of the coffee consumed every day is drunk at home, 15% at work, 4% at eating establishments, 4% while traveling, and 2% at other locations.

Waffles are another popular breakfast favorite and parallel interest in waffle makers has skyrocketed in recent years. Nonstick coatings, variable browning features, and spill troughs to eliminate the hassle of cleaning up spillovers are among the many wonderful contemporary features you should highlight to your customers.

Tabletop grills for pancakes, electric skillets for French toast, bread machines for that just-out-of-the-oven taste, even the rice cooker for cooking oatmeal are all breakfast merchandising opportunities. Retailers seeking to boost their small electrics sales can benefit from promoting how each of these appliances make breakfast preparation convenient, quick, healthful, and most of all, fun.

Building Breakfast Business

Wherever your customers reside on the breakfast scale — grab-and-go or sit-down feast, you stock the kitchenware product to meet their needs. From coffee makers to waffle irons, from griddles to egg timers, from cast iron cookware to tea cups, and from muffin tins to butter bells, proper merchandising and promotion can make breakfast one of your most viable retail categories.