As the World Cup enters the early kickoff window, who has seized the morning catering orders? Budweiser Breakfast Pop-up Store has unlocked new business opportunities for Budweiser non-alcoholic products and catering merchants.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico features a total of 104 matches. Converted to Beijing time, more than half of the games are scheduled between 5 a.m. and 12 p.m. For domestic office workers in China, the match viewing hours overlap with their sleep, breakfast and commuting time, and the consumption patterns formed around late-night football watching in previous tournaments have also changed accordingly.
Consumption data has already reflected the shift in consumption time slots. Monitoring data from JD Delivery shows that during the World Cup, breakfast orders placed between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. rose by about 60% compared with the pre-tournament period, and orders from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. registered a growth rate of nearly 50%. Although this is data from a single platform and cannot represent the entire industry, it is sufficient to prove that new consumption demands have been generated in the early morning hours. Categories that are easy to deliver and suitable for eating while watching games, such as hamburgers, soups and congee, and boiled dumplings, have achieved faster growth than traditional breakfast items.
Current consumption related to match viewing has been divided into three scenarios: the early-morning matches are more suitable for watching at home, which continues to drive the consumption of midnight snacks and food delivery; the matches held in the early morning overlap with commuting hours, making breakfast, coffee and convenience store products more likely to be purchased by consumers; only a small number of high-profile matches will drive consumers to gather offline. The key to capturing this wave of new orders lies in whether the stores can operate in line with the match schedule, rather than simply relying on marketing promotion.
Coffee and fast food brands have natural advantages in terms of operating hours. Many coffee brands take advantage of the World Cup to attract football fans through cooperation related to football teams and star players, driving the sales of drinks, in-store foot traffic and membership growth. Fast food chains focus on in-store operations, launching match-themed products, and some stores have created dedicated viewing spaces. Unlike bars that need to temporarily adjust their morning business hours, fast food outlets already have fixed breakfast shifts, takeout processes and on-duty staff for morning hours. The World Cup only brings new consumption reasons to these stores, without requiring them to restructure their entire business model.
The common advantage of coffee shops, fast food outlets and convenience stores is that they already have mature morning operation capabilities and standardized products, allowing consumers to complete their purchases quickly. The World Cup only amplifies the popularity of some products, and does not require stores to completely change their original revenue structure for the tournament. Some bakeries and shopping malls have also advanced their opening time to 6:30 a.m., adding a World Cup atmosphere to their existing breakfast business, which follows the same logic.
In contrast, it is much more difficult for bars and alcohol brands to adapt to the early-morning matches. Bars are equipped with large screens and have an environment suitable for group match viewing, but opening in the early morning will lead to rising costs of manpower, energy consumption and food preparation; on weekday mornings, alcoholic drinks can hardly become the mainstream choice. Many stores and brands have turned to non-alcoholic drinks and breakfast sets, or cooperated with other catering formats to explore new solutions, turning the challenge brought by the time difference of the matches into new business ideas.
However, the problem for stores that only operate at night is not simply holding morning match viewing activities. The number of customers varies greatly due to different rounds of matches and different popularity levels of participating teams, and the morning demand of stores around residential areas, business districts and office buildings also differs from each other. Even if unified promotional materials can be put in place quickly, stores still need to weigh the manpower and food input for each match to control operating costs.
Sports event marketing can boost short-term orders, but the catering industry is currently in a competitive environment with high marketing investment. The rising marketing investment does not necessarily translate directly into the improvement of store operating efficiency. Therefore, different business formats need to use practical indicators to measure the benefits brought by the early-morning matches: coffee and fast food outlets should focus on member retention after the event and the daily sales performance of stores; bars need to calculate whether the morning revenue can cover the newly added costs; food delivery platforms need to observe whether the early-morning order peak is replicable. Brand exposure does not equal actual store profitability.
Large-scale sports events can briefly change the public's consumption time, but the behavior of "watching football matches and eating breakfast in the morning" may not evolve into a long-term consumption habit. After the tournament ends, what can really be retained are the supply chain, store network and user base that brands have accumulated over time. For merchants, the greater test lies in whether they can flexibly adapt to market changes at a relatively low cost in response to the temporary change in consumers' time arrangement.