The Discontinued Chick-Fil-A Cinnamon Clusters We Almost Forgot About

If you prefer sweet over savory breakfast items, Chick-fil-A currently doesn't have much to offer besides yogurt and fruit cups. Unsurprisingly, the majority of Chick-fil-A breakfast options are variations of a chicken sandwich. However, for many years Chick-fil-A also had Cinnamon Clusters on the menu. This breakfast pastry was made up of six mini cinnamon rolls that were baked together to form a singular cluster. Much like a traditional cinnamon roll, it was also drizzled with vanilla icing.

Cinnamon clusters were originally introduced to the Chick-fil-A menu in 2005, after being test-marketed in Baltimore. They were so well received by customers that Chick-fil-A decided to roll them out nationwide. They remained on the menu until 2016, when the restaurant announced it would be discontinuing them alongside another breakfast item, oatmeal. It isn't uncommon for fast food chains to pull items if they aren't popular enough, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the Cinnamon Clusters, at least based on comments on a memorial video Chick-fil-A posted on YouTube as well as a recent Reddit thread. At one point there was even a Change.org petition customers were signing to get Chick-fil-A to bring them back.

When Chick-fil-A announced the discontinuation of Cinnamon Clusters, it didn't give an explanation as to why, but there's reason to believe it could've been related to production. The Cinnamon Clusters were actually sourced by an outside supplier Sweet Eddie's, so rather than being made in-house, they were delivered to all the Chick-fil-A restaurants from the Georgia-based bakery. While this clearly worked well for Chick-fil-A for many years, it seems Chick-fil-A may have been seeking a new approach.

In 2019, Chick-fil-A revealed that another cinnamon-roll-type menu item had been in the works and even made it to the test marketing stage, but was ultimately scrapped. "Even though the recipe was simple, it was surprisingly complex to make across all our restaurants," Chick-fil-A explained in a post on the now defunct Chick-fil-A blog. "Customers loved how it tasted, but because we couldn't prepare it fresh in our restaurant kitchens each morning and get it right every time, we cut it." Considering neither Cinnamon Biscuits nor Clusters are on the menu, perhaps Chick-fil-A just wasn't able to find a happy medium between the cinnamon pastries.