Wendy’s is rethinking breakfast.
The fast-food chain is taking another look at its breakfast business as CEO Bob Wright works to turn around the struggling brand.
Earlier this year, Wendy’s gave some franchisees the option to stop serving breakfast and focus on lunch, dinner and late-night sales. But the move may have come at a cost. Cutting breakfast hours at some locations contributed to a 12.5 percent drop in U.S. customer traffic in the second quarter, CFO Steve Cirulis said Friday during an earnings call.
Fewer discounts also contributed to the decline, he said. Still, most Wendy’s restaurants continue to serve breakfast.
“Breakfast is important to us, and it’s a complex topic that frankly we’re still analyzing very deeply,” Wright said during an earnings call Friday. “It can’t be disconnected from the broader strategy and the work that we’re doing there.”
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open image in galleryWright continued, “For some franchisees, the opt-out was really helpful. It provided a little bit of a relief valve, but it’s still a key area that’s under evaluation for us. We need to get our footing on the remainder of the strategy before we start deciding exactly where breakfast fits into that.”
In February, interim CEO Ken Cook said Wendy’s was giving franchisees more flexibility to reduce breakfast hours, allowing restaurants to focus resources on lunch, dinner and late-night sales. The move came as U.S. same-store sales fell 11.3 percent during the fourth quarter of 2025, the chain’s steepest decline in about six years.
Wendy’s closed 289 U.S. locations during the first half of 2026, as the chain works to shut down underperforming restaurants. That represents around 5 percent of its U.S. locations, of which there are currently around 5,634, according to the company’s website.
Wendy’s launched its current breakfast menu in 2019 after several failed attempts to break into the morning market. The menu features breakfast sandwiches, biscuits, croissants, breakfast potatoes, Cinnabon treats and coffee. It initially took off, with the company once expecting breakfast to eventually generate $1 billion in sales.
That momentum has since cooled. Breakfast now accounts for about 5 percent to 5.5 percent of Wendy’s overall sales, down from 8 percent in the second quarter of 2020, just a year after its launch, Cirulis said Friday.
“We want to make sure that we’re looking at this as a brand, as a complete menu in the context of the consumer, of the franchisees and where we think growth is going to come from,” Cirulis said.