Does Bojangles Make Its Breakfast Biscuits From Scratch?
Making biscuits from scratch isn't especially difficult, but it can have some particular challenges. Amateur hands may overwork the dough while kneading or folding it, resulting in dense, chewy discs instead of light, fluffy biscuits. And for restaurants that make biscuits fresh in-house, it takes an exacting process — in Bojangles' case, precisely 49 steps — to get the same perfect biscuits every time.
Every Bojangles employs a Master Biscuit Maker (the real job title) who leads employees in making biscuits from scratch at a dedicated biscuit-making station, showing how serious Bojangles is about this bread. And the reason its recipe is so long is to ensure the employee is paying attention to all the little details that can make or break a batch of biscuits.
Bojangles claims that its average restaurant churns out over 1,000 of these fluffy, buttery delights every 8 hours. With 884 locations in the United States, which are typically open for more than 8 hours a day, that's well over a million made-from-scratch biscuits system-wide every day. Volumes like those are necessary to keep the company's promise of fresh biscuits every 20 minutes or less.
How Bojangles biscuits stack up to the competition
Bojangles is one of the chain restaurants that serves fresh biscuits, but some rivals chose frozen, and not always to customers' disapproval. Popeyes biscuits have an equally cultish following, even though they are shipped to restaurants frozen. And when you bite into the dense and dry biscuit, however much you might enjoy it, you can tell it was frozen. Especially compared to the light freshness of Bojangles.
People craving a Bojangles biscuit can get their fix early in the day, too, as it's one of 11 fast-food chains that have breakfast ready by 7 AM. But biscuits are more integral to Bojangles' success than most businesses. Unlike many of its rivals, Bo's biscuits are available all day on sandwiches or á la carte via the all-day breakfast menu, a relative rarity in fast food. They're also a standard side with Family Meals containing 12+ pieces of chicken.
As one of the rare fast food items truly made from scratch, Bojangles' biscuits help prove that, amid an industry era of automated mass production, there's still room for scratch cooking with human hands. It's part of what makes food great.