How can IHOP serve huge portions of breakfast food for so little money?
How does the restaurant turn a profit while keeping prices so
cheap? You may be surprised by the answer. Keep watching to learn more.
Eggs are nutritional powerhouses. One single egg contains six grams of protein and many
vitamins and minerals. Yet the average price for a dozen eggs in the US is only around two bucks,
which comes out to about sixteen cents an egg. At that rate, an omelet made with three
fresh eggs should only cost about fifty cents. You'd think with prices that cheap,
IHOP could afford to use fresh eggs in all of its breakfast dishes. Instead,
the company supposedly makes its omelets and scrambled egg dishes with an egg substitute.
An alleged former employee claimed on Tik Tok that his training manager
told him that IHOP uses a liquid egg substitute for many dishes.
"The eggs in the scrambled eggs and the eggs in the omelet, those aren't real eggs."
A Redditor claiming to be an IHOP cook said the restaurant actually uses bagged liquid eggs.
They're not freshly-cracked eggs, but we wouldn't exactly call them a substitute either.
The former server on TikTok goes on to say that IHOP's secret is that you can
get freshly-cracked eggs if you want — you just have to specifically request them when you order.
Maple syrup is the liquid gold of breakfast. And it's kinda priced that way too:
real deal maple syrup usually costs $8 or more for a 12.5 oz. bottle,
while the fake maple syrup only costs about half of that.How can you tell the difference?
If it's authentic, there should be just one ingredient on the label: maple syrup.
The stuff you drizzle on IHOP's pancakes is not real maple syrup. Taking a peek at
the nutrition facts for IHOP's syrup shows that it contains corn syrup,
sugar, caramel color, artificial flavors, preservatives, and thickening agents.
Interestingly, the word "maple" doesn't appear even once on the ingredient list.
When the vast majority of your business model depends on pancakes,
it's more profitable to find low-cost alternatives to real maple syrup since it's so expensive.
The beauty of an omelet is its simplicity. With just a few beaten eggs and some butter,
you can whip up a luscious dish that's filling and nutritious.
You wouldn't expect a popular breakfast restaurant like IHOP to rock the boat too much when it comes
to omelets, but the company has a bizarre trick up its sleeve: Pancake batter. According to The Daily
Meal, IHOP adds a little bit of pancake batter to its omelets. Apparently, the pancake batter
gives the omelets more structure and also makes them fluffier. A look at the nutritional label
for IHOP's omelets confirms this, showing that after eggs, the next two ingredients are flour
and sugar — the main components of a pancake. Adding pancake batter to omelets may provide some
textural difference, but it also makes them look a little bigger without adding any extra eggs. By
whisking in some flour and sugar into its omelets, IHOP has found a cheap way to bulk them up.
"You get more than the perfect omelet on your plate. You get a smile on your plate."
Potatoes and breakfast go hand-in-hand. They are a key player in crispy hashes,
fluffy frittatas, and loaded breakfast burritos.
But perhaps the most beloved breakfast potato dish is the hash brown. Shredded thin and fried golden,
hash browns pair perfectly with just about any egg dish and breakfast meat on your plate,
though they're fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming to make from scratch.
As a result, IHOP uses pre-made hash browns. A self-proclaimed IHOP cook
on Reddit says that the restaurant's hash browns come dehydrated and get rehydrated
with hot water before getting grilled in a rack. This claim seems to check out,
judging by the preservatives listed on the nutritional info for hash browns on IHOP's
menu online. By using pre-made hash browns, IHOP is cutting down on a lot of prep time so that the
restaurant's cooks can quickly prepare them to keep up with demand. Being able to efficiently
pump out hash browns ensures lower prices because there's much less labor involved.
America loves macaroni & cheese. And for good reason: it's cheap, simple, and delicious.
When many of us think back to some of the first foods we ever cooked on our own,
there's probably a good chance that macaroni & cheese is somewhere on that list.
"Bless this highly nutritious microwavable
macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale. Amen."
According to Insider, about one million boxes of Kraft macaroni & cheese are sold every single day.
It makes perfect sense that a restaurant like IHOP that specializes in classic American food would
add macaroni & cheese to its menu. But instead of taking the time to make it from scratch,
it uses Kraft. Just to be absolutely clear: we aren't knocking Kraft. We definitely have
a special place in our hearts for that blue box of macaroni & cheese from childhood.
But there's no doubt that macaroni & cheese made from scratch is far superior,
and let's face it — when we go out to eat at a restaurant, we're expecting it to be better
than something we can easily make at home. That said, making macaroni & cheese from
scratch takes time and there's no doubt that using all of that fresh cheese costs more.
By using Kraft macaroni & cheese, IHOP is keeping the cost of this classic dish to a bare minimum,
which makes it nice and cheap on the menu. IHOP makes a lot of money. In 2020 alone,
IHOP topped more than two billion dollars in sales from its more than 1,600 locations around
the United States. There's no doubt that IHOP's cooks and servers are a big reason why the company
has been so financially successful. Without their labor, the food wouldn't get prepared or brought
to your table — and your cravings for IHOP's pancakes would be nothing more than a daydream.
Yet, according to Payscale, the average hourly wage at IHOP is only
$10.81 an hour. This hourly wage is far below the national median of $16.36.
By paying its labor force low wages, IHOP is able to maximize its profit margin. In turn,
IHOP's menu prices stay anchored on the cheaper side. That said, one study from Purdue University
shows that increasing wages at restaurants to $22 an hour would lead to a 25% increase in
prices — which means a stack of pancakes from IHOP would only cost you a couple more bucks.
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