In April, Bloomberg Businessweek wrote about Dunkin’ Donuts’ (DNKN) test of a Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich in the Boston area. On Monday, the chain announced it is launching the item—a pepper-fried egg with cherrywood-smoked bacon inside a glazed doughnut—nationwide on Friday, June 7.
“We conducted a small operational test in select stores in Massachusetts in April, and we were very pleased with the response from our guests,” Dunkin’ Brands spokeswoman Michelle King wrote in an e-mail. All the ingredients were already being used in stores. Training staff to make the sandwich basically meant showing them how to slice a doughnut and add the fried egg and bacon, so the chain was able to launch it quickly.
Now the real question: How does it taste? While preparing our story on extreme foods, we asked Dunkin’ Donuts to ship a doughnut sandwich to our office. In reality, it’s not as wild (or gross) as the concept might suggest. The sandwich has a sweet and salty combination that reminded me of eating French toast with eggs and bacon, drizzled with syrup. Separately, the ingredients are pretty mundane; what’s novel is putting them all in a single vessel. The sandwich remains hard to rationalize until you try it. There are a lot of flavors going on, though, so this might not be the sandwich for those who prefer plainer foods.
The doughnut sandwich has 360 calories—surprisingly, that’s 100 calories shy of Dunkin’s bacon, egg, and cheese on a bagel. Still, a single sandwich provides 31 percent of the recommended daily intake of fat, including 40 percent of a day’s saturated fat and 30 percent of the daily sodium allotment. It also happens to contain a small amount of Vitamin A, calcium, and iron. But seriously, who’s ordering a bacon doughnut sandwich for their health?
