LAS VEGAS — During the company’s 69th annual convention at Mandalay Bay Resort, leaders from Choice Hotels International announced plans to refresh the complimentary breakfast program at Comfort and Country Inn & Suites by Radisson hotels.
The move is part of a broader strategy to refine and differentiate Choice’s upper-midscale brands and help attract travelers.
The company is piloting new signature breakfast items, including a breakfast bowl at select Comfort hotels and a biscuit sandwich at some Country Inn & Suites. The Comfort brand's Build Your Own Breakfast Bowl will let guests create a meal tailored to their own tastes and dietary preferences, choosing from scrambled eggs, potatoes, peppers, onions, bacon bits, cheddar cheese and 'Everything Bagel' and 'Nashville Hot' seasonings. Country Inn & Suites, meanwhile, will launch a pilot of Pillsbury biscuit sandwiches.
As part of this initiative, Choice has signed agreements with Florida’s Natural and General Mills, and is finalizing a new agreement with a national brand to serve their coffee in Comfort properties. During the brand session at the conference, Comfort Brand Leader Joe Francisco said that 30 percent of hotel guests care enough about their coffee at hotels to let it determine where they stay. “And according to the New York Board of Trade, coffee prices are up 98 percent versus this time last year,” he added, noting that the agreement would lock in contracted pricing and discounts to help offset those increasing costs.
Jenny Aboudou, Choice’s head of upper midscale brands, said that the team looked at the breakfast concepts “in parallel” so that the research and development “could be really focused on where they should—and can—have moments of differentiation.”
Group Purchasing
Choice worked with its group-purchasing organization Entegra for product development to align offerings with both guest preferences and owner goals. Choice Hotels is leveraging Entegra's relationships with food providers of some of the most in-demand breakfast items, like eggs and muffins, to help secure favorable pricing for owners and develop menus that are both delectable and cost-effective. The partnership with Entegra, which began in July 2024, showed an average 9 percent savings on food costs for participating hotels through March 2025 based on 'market basket' comparisons by Entegra. As it tests its new breakfast items, Choice Hotels is also bringing franchise owners into the Entegra Performance Kitchen to work with their culinary team, gaining real-time feedback to shape its food offerings.
“We don't just create these things in a vacuum and say, ‘Here you go,’” said Judd Wadholm, senior vice president and general manager of Choice Hotels' Core Brands. “It is a true collaboration. … It's combining this expertise that we have, this knowledge, the data, with owners who live and breathe it every day, and that's what makes it successful.”
Earlier this year, Choice Hotels updated the brand positioning for Comfort and Country Inn & Suites along with refreshed prototypes designed to create more revenue-generating spaces within the same footprint. The company also plans to test and roll out a series of new and evolved brand hallmarks later this year, including updated furniture, fixtures and equipment packages.