IN an unfamiliar scene one morning, people dine on ackee and saltfish at a KFC in Kingston. Eating the national dish for breakfast is nothing new to Jamaicans. It’s the location that makes it unique.

KFC, renowned for its fried chicken offerings more suited towards lunch and dinner, late last year launched a breakfast menu that includes an ackee and saltfish and plantain wrap; a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, and porridge. The move by Restaurants of Jamaica, owners of the local KFC franchise, is part of a bigger movement.

One can’t help but notice that fast food brands, more formally known as quick service restaurants (QSRs), are currently engaged in a heated battle for shares in the breakfast market in Jamaica. Mother’s has a “7 Minutes or It’s Free” breakfast campaign. Burger King heavily promoted a limited time offer — which ran for months — boasting breakfast sandwiches for as low as $100, and allowing diners to add a hot beverage (coffee, tea or hot chocolate) for just $100 with each purchase.

Thalia Lyn, CEO of Jamaican fast food chain Island Grill, said that the development comes amid a fast-growing market for breakfast on the go in Jamaica, at the same time QSRs are looking to gain more sales in the highly competitive industry.

“The major chains are looking for more market share, so it’s a ready-made opportunity,” Lyn said.

“You have the infrastructure there, all you have to do is bring in the staff earlier, so it’s a logical kind of add-on,” she told the Business Observer.

Island Grill, outside of its core menu, featuring a range of chicken and fish meals and sandwiches more geared towards lunch and dinner time, offers Jamaican-style breakfast, including stew chicken and callaloo and saltfish, at its Constant Spring, New Kingston, Downtown Kingston, and Norman Manley International Airport outlets.

While the 18-restaurant fast food chain had pulled breakfast from some stores, situated in plazas that opened outside peak breakfast hours, it plans a renewed effort to meet growing demand, Lyn said.

“We are getting more requests for breakfast and it is something we have on the drawing board,” said the Island Grill boss, without going into specific details of the plan.

While a breakfast menu is not new to the QSR sector in Jamaica, never before has there been such aggression among the players in that day-part, as segments of the daily fast food market are called, says industry insider, Sean Scott.

“As the QSR industry in Jamaica has matured, businesses no longer have growth opportunities through opening new stores because many of the major brands have basically saturated the market in terms of number of stores,” Scott said.

“Once you have exhausted the opportunity of growth through store openings, the next phase to get revenue is through a new part of the day,” said the QSR expert, noting that there is a morning day-part, a lunch day-part, a snack day-part, a dinner day-part and a late night day-part.

“Traditionally, most QSRs are all about lunch, snacks and dinner. The new day-parts that mature brands are looking to grow further revenues are late night and breakfast,” Scott said.

As a percentage of total sales, Scott said that a breakfast day-part could account for as much as a quarter of revenues at a more established, morning-oriented QSR. But a breakfast campaign attracting at least 15 per cent of total sales a day generally would be considered “very successful”, he said.

Scott is the CEO of Wisynco Foods, local franchise holder of Wendy’s, which has ironically retreated from breakfast and gone after late-night, with its Liguanea, Kingston location opening until 1:00 am on Fridays and Saturdays, on a trial basis for the summer.

“We are one of the younger brands, with only four store units in Jamaica. We want to focus on growing in stores and growing the core lunch and dinner day-parts,” Scott said.

“We are not even close to maturity and sometimes it’s a risk in trying to do too much before you build out that kind of network. Breakfast is really seen as kind of like the last frontier,” he added.

Industry insiders estimate that traditional ‘mom and pop’ cook shops control the lion’s share of the breakfast market in Jamaica, with QSR businesses aiming to take shares away from them.

Among the QSRs, however, Juici Patties is said to dominate. Juici, a Jamaican franchise, is arguably as popular for its traditional breakfast and porridges as much as its flagship patty product, giving it a competitive advantage over the international fast food brands, whose franchise partners won’t let them do a complete Jamaican menu. What’s more, with 61 restaurants, a high percentage of them offering breakfast, Juici reaches further than any other QSR in the country.

“Juici was the first QSR to offer a proper Jamaican breakfast. A lot of the QSRs, that are international, the breakfast offerings are traditionally American. Eggs, bacon, cheese, sausages etc are not customary for how we as Jamaicans eat breakfast,” said Scott.

“Juici, as a local brand, was able to tap into the relevance and also affordability because those Americanised items tend to be more expensive,” added the Wisynco Foods boss.

Juici Patties marketing manager Jackie Scott — no relation to Wisynco’s Scott — said the foundation for the restaurant’s breakfast offering, which is more than a decade old, lies upon an in-house service provided to workers on the early morning shift.

“The history is kind of funny. Because we have workers coming early in the morning, we used to have to provide breakfast for them, and our customers who came early to buy the patties started asking about it,” she said.

Once they decided to provide a breakfast menu, the Clarendon-born franchise leaned towards traditional dishes, some of them too time consuming for an increasingly fast-paced society to prepare at home, said the Juici marketing manager.

“Most people who grew up in the country, grew up on hominy, peanut and different type of porridges but they don’t have time to make it,” noted Jackie Scott.

“That’s where Juici came in.”

Juici’s major rival in the patty businees, Tastee Limited, is also a big player in the breakfast market, also providing primarily traditional dishes at many of its 30-odd outlets across the island.

Other domestic restaurants such as Island Grill have taken heed of the demand and are looking to capitalise.

“We realise what they want is Jamaican breakfast,” said Lyn. “At our airport store, for instance, they don’t want a muffin and coffee, they want their last taste of Jamaica before they get on the plane. And if I don’t have ackee, I am in a lot of trouble, I hear about it.”