What makes an egg an egg?
It sounds like an existential question, but Panera is insisting that it's a practical matter -- and one that the Food and Drug Administration should clarify.
In conjunction with the official launch of six new breakfast sandwich recipes featuring an over-easy (runny) egg, Panera has petitioned the FDA to better define eggs.
"Amend 21 CFR 160.100 to clearly define the term “egg” to reflect a food made from a cracked shell egg without addition of additives or further processing (other than pasteurization or other treatment to destroy all viable Salmonella microorganisms from the shell egg)," Panera said in its petition, which it filed late Thursday. The petition goes on to note that current FDA edicts say that "No regulation shall be promulgated fixing and establishing a reasonable definition and standard of identity for the food commonly known as eggs."
Panera isn't shy about how or why the petition came about: in researching the breakfast sandwich landscape and preparing to launch the six new recipes and the runny egg promotion, it found that not every egg sandwich in the market is made with a "pure" egg.
"We looked at the competitive set and people are calling things bacon egg and cheese sandwiches, but we looked at the ingredients and saw the eggs that over half these top brands were using have five ingredients or more. And they're stil calling their product an egg," Sara Burnett, Panera's director of food policy and wellness, told Forbes.
She's not entirely wrong about this. The ingredients for Dunkin Donuts' egg patty, for instance, are listed as such: "Egg Whites, Egg Yolks, Soybean Oil, Water, Contains 2% or less of: Corn Starch, Salt, Natural Flavor, Xanthan Gum, Cellulose Gum, Citric Acid." And
Breakfast sandwiches are not a new element to Panera's menu; the chain has been offering them for years, and even started soft-launching the over-easy egg sandwiches over the summer. What's different, CEO Blaine Hurst told Forbes, is the preparation.
"In the past, we cracked that egg into what's called an egg ring, and we cooked it until the center of that egg was completely solid," he said. Panera's goal was to crack the egg like customers do at home, and serve it when it's still runny. "A lot of [brands] do egg sandwiches, obviously, but at scale, we don't know of any QSR or fast-casual restaurant concept that does a runny egg sandwich, and we're not sure of many that could," he added.
Pedantic though it may seem, Panera's push to define eggs is consistent with the brand's broader goal of bringing "clean" food and transparent menus to its customers. At the beginning of 2017, the chain announced that its menu was 100% "clean," meaning free of any artificial sweeteners, preservatives, flavors or colors. And last summer, it started posting calorie and added sugar information on its fountain drink cups.
"Our hope is we create that conversation with our peers about how are we transparent, honest and fair about how we name products as an industry, and also so the consumer is aware that an egg is not always an egg," Burnett said.
"It's really a question of, you should know what you're getting," Hurst added. "It's not us preaching at you and telling you what to do, it's really just: let's be clear with our consumers about what's in our food, what they're eating, and then they can make the choice."
