Bob Evans aims to lure more diners with a candied bacon appetizer
If you’ve heard of Bob Evans, you likely associate it with breakfast and sausage. The 70-year-old chain has 521 restaurants in the US, mostly in the Midwest and Southeast, and sausage is its best-known menu item.
But now the Ohio-based, publicly traded (BOBE) company is going big on bacon. All Bob Evans restaurants are now offering candied bacon, served in a hip mason jar, as an appetizer.
The bacon, which will debut on Wednesday, is sticky and syrupy, coated with brown sugar and a “secret recipe,” and served cold. Bob Evans believes it can drive new people to try eating at a Bob Evans restaurant. (You can watch our Yahoo Finance taste test of the bacon on Facebook.)
You’d be excused for presuming that the mason jar is a touch aimed at millennials, but the chain is now serving all its beverages in mason jars, and VP of Bob Evans restaurants John Fisher says: “It’s all part of the articulation of what we want the brand to be. The farm house feeling, the warm family feeling.”
Many quick-serve restaurant chains have launched wild food items in the last couple of years as a way to drum up new attention, from Burger King’s Whopperrito, Mac n Cheetos, and this week, Cheetos Chicken Fries, to KFC’s Double Down sandwich (cheese, sauce, and bacon between two fried chicken breasts) to Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos. It has become something of a craze.
But candied bacon is no wacky food item, says Fisher. “I wouldn’t call it a craze,” he says, “it just makes sense for Bob Evans because it fits with the brand.”
What is that brand, exactly? Fisher frames it as homestyle breakfast in a down-on-the-farm atmosphere. Bob Evans, the restaurant’s namesake, started the business when he opened a diner called The Sausage Shop in Rio Grande, Ohio.
Bob Evans also sells packaged products in grocery stores across the US, but 70% of its revenue comes from the restaurants. This year, the company brought on a new CEO, restaurant veteran Saed Mohseni, and committed to becoming all cage-free for its eggs by 2025.
Doesn’t serving up a jar full of bacon strips fly in the face of recent trends toward healthy diets? “Not really,” says Fisher, “when you come in and have the bacon as an appetizer, and then have our veggie omelet. This is just a nice little snack. There’s plenty of health there… it’s good protein.”
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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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