--- title: Fast Food Is Going to War Over These Three Menu Items description: Chicken nugget deals are incredibly cheap at fast food restaurants right now, and coffee promotions are cheaper still. Competition over breakfast sandwiches is white hot too. authors: - name: Brad Tuttle role: Senior Editor url: https://money.com/author/brad-tuttle/ bio: Brad Tuttle is a former senior editor at Money with over 10 years’ experience covering a vast number of personal finance topics, including careers, cars, travel, budgeting, investing, insurance, credit cards, consumer psychology, real estate, banking, and shopping and deals. education: Columbia University School of Journalism, MS at_money_since: 2014 articles: 366 covers: - Shopping - Banking - Business - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Personal Finance - Pets - Professional Services - Retirement - Taxes - Technology social: - https://twitter.com/bradrtuttle - https://linkedin.com/in/brad-tuttle-834b225 former_staff: true published: '2015-01-13T17:19:38.000Z' modified: '2024-05-16T10:05:06.000Z' section: Shopping tags: - breakfast - Burger King - Chicken Nuggets - Coffee - deals - Fast Food - Food & Drink - freebies - Mcdonald's - Sonic word_count: 619 canonical: https://money.com/fast-food-deals-nuggets-coffee-breakfast/ type: Article source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![Burger King, Las Vegas airport, Nevada](https://img.money.com/2015/01/150113_em_fastfoodwars1.jpg) Fast food's biggest players will always compete over burgers, low-price value menu deals, and limited-time-only items that pop up seasonally. (Speaking of which, it's getting close to [Shamrock Shake time](http://business.time.com/2013/03/11/shamrock-shake-alert-why-we-so-love-those-limited-time-offers/) at McDonald's.) Lately, though, the competition has gotten particularly focused, and particularly tough, concerning these three menu categories. **Chicken Nuggets** This week, Burger King kicked off a fierce nugget competition, offering a 10-piece chicken nugget order for just $1.49, roughly half the usual menu price. Or rather, it reintroduced the deal, which it also launched onto the scene for a limited period last fall. At the time, [Burger King](http://investor.bk.com/conteudo_en.asp?idioma=1&tipo=43682&conta=44&id=165734&storyId=70711071) described the 15¢ nugget promotion "an aggressive deal rivaling anything our competition has ever done." That competition notably includes McDonald's, which periodically offers a promotional deal at most locations of 20 nuggets for $4.99 and 50 for $9.99. The latter breaks down to a cost of 20¢ per nugget. (NOTE: 20-piece and 50-piece nugget orders are intended to be shared, not consumed by a single customer in one sitting. One 40-year-old [Daily Beast writer](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/13/i-ate-a-50-piece-chicken-mcnugget-because-yolo.html) can attest to this after voluntarily taking on the highly inadvisable, 2,375-calorie challenge of eating 50 McDonald's nuggets by himself. Inevitably, the task involved a run for the bathroom mid-challenge, perhaps because "digestive enzymes may be making me hallucinate, or maybe the salt and fat overload is draining my endorphins dry.") **Coffee** Most fast-food promotional offers are created with the purpose of driving traffic into restaurants early and often. So it especially makes sense for quick-serve restaurants to pump up promotions on items that customers crave at all hours of the day. In today's world, there's no better item than coffee, which people will drink morning, afternoon, and night, and which comes with the added bonus of being pretty darn cheap to brew. Hence, the ongoing free coffee promotions at McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts dueling for customers in certain parts of the country. Coffee deals are hot right now at convenience stores for largely the same reasons: They draw in customers, which is a much tougher sell in the winter because it's cold and folks tend to want to stay home or at least not get out of their cars. [Cumberland Farms](http://www.cumberlandfarms.com/ProductsAndPromotions/FarmhouseBlend.aspx), for instance, is heavily promoting its coffee, which sells for 99¢ in any size, while [7-Eleven](https://www.facebook.com/7Eleven) has a changing roster of deals including two donuts and a coffee for $2 and buy six coffees and the seventh is free for customers using its app. **Breakfast Sandwiches** The battle for fast food breakfast customers got heated in early 2014 with the introduction of Taco Bell's Waffle Taco, and it hasn't really cooled off. A big reason why fast food giants are duking it out over breakfast with particular ferocity is that for years breakfast has been the only meal time that has experienced [regular growth](https://time.com/65504/fast-food-breakfast/) at quick-serve restaurants, which offer convenient, on-the-go foods to help on-the-go Americans start their day. This is why Taco Bell jumped into the breakfast scene nationally last year, and why other players such as [Chick-fil-A, Taco John's, and White Castle](http://www.qsrweb.com/articles/sugar-and-spice-and-everything-breakfast-2014-on-the-menu-3/) expanded or began exploring breakfast menus too. In almost all cases, breakfast items focus on the sandwich because it is hand-held and can be eaten easily behind the wheel—a feature that's especially important during breakfast hours, when the typical customer is trying to get somewhere while fueling up for the day. The latest entrant into the breakfast sandwich wars is the French Toaster, an egg-cheese-and-meat mix bookended by two pieces of French toast from [Sonic](http://ir.sonicdrivein.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=891001). A [MarketWatch story](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-breakfast-sandwiches-the-new-burgers-2015-01-12) declared that "the new battleground in the world of fast food is the breakfast sandwich," and that the portability of the French Toaster and other breakfast sandwiches is essential for their success. ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://money.com/fast-food-deals-nuggets-coffee-breakfast/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://money.com" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Shopping", "item": "https://money.com/shopping/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Food and Drink", "item": "https://money.com/food-and-drink/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 4, "name": "Fast Food Is Going to War Over These Three Menu Items" } ] }, { "@type": "WebSite", "@id": "https://money.com/#website", "url": "https://money.com", "name": "Money", "publisher": { "@id": "https://money.com/#organization" } }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://money.com/fast-food-deals-nuggets-coffee-breakfast/#webpage", "url": "https://money.com/fast-food-deals-nuggets-coffee-breakfast/", "name": "Fast Food Is Going to War Over These Three Menu Items", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://money.com/#website" }, "datePublished": "2015-01-13T17:19:38.000Z", "mainEntity": { "@id": "https://money.com/fast-food-deals-nuggets-coffee-breakfast/" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://money.com/fast-food-deals-nuggets-coffee-breakfast/#breadcrumb" }, "dateModified": "2024-05-16T10:05:06.000Z" }, { "@type": "Article", "headline": "Fast Food Is Going to War Over These Three Menu Items", "articleSection": "Shopping", "image": [ { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://img.money.com/2015/01/150113_em_fastfoodwars1.jpg", "width": 5200, "height": 3429, "caption": "150113_EM_FastFoodWars" } ], "author": [ { "@type": "Person", "name": "Brad Tuttle", "url": "https://money.com/author/brad-tuttle/", "@id": "https://money.com/author/brad-tuttle/#author", "description": "Brad Tuttle is a former senior editor at Money with over 10 years’ experience covering a vast number of personal finance topics, including careers, cars, travel, budgeting, investing, insurance, credit cards, consumer psychology, real estate, banking, and shopping and deals.\r\n\r\n", "image": "https://img.money.com/2014/01/Brad-Tuttle.png?w=226&h=247&crop=1", "alumniOf": "Columbia University School of Journalism, MS", "sameAs": [ "https://twitter.com/bradrtuttle", "https://linkedin.com/in/brad-tuttle-834b225" ] } ], "publisher": "https://money.com/#organization", "datePublished": "2015-01-13T17:19:38.000Z", "description": "Chicken nugget deals are incredibly cheap at fast food restaurants right now, and coffee promotions are cheaper still. 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