There’s a breakfast chain down South that just won USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Award for best fast-food breakfast in America for the fourth year in a row — beating out McDonald’s (No. 4) and Chick-fil-A (No. 5) — and most people in Iowa have never heard of it (USA Today via MSN).
It’s called Biscuitville. It has 90 restaurants. It exists in exactly three states: North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. That’s it. The best breakfast in fast food, four years running, and it’s confined to one corner of the Southeast like it’s under house arrest.
I’m here to make the case that Biscuitville should open up shop in Iowa. Not someday. Now. And I think once you hear this company’s story, you’ll agree they’d fit here better than they probably realize.
The Best Breakfast Chain You Can’t Visit
First, understand what we’re missing. Biscuitville makes its biscuits from scratch every 15 minutes using a three-ingredient family recipe. The eggs are hand-cracked. There are no microwaves in the kitchen. Nothing arrives partially cooked. Nothing is “instant” anything (USA Today via MSN).
That’s not how fast food works. Fast food is supposed to be a trade: you give up freshness, you get speed. Biscuitville’s whole pitch is that you don’t have to trade. Fresh AND fast. When their chief marketing officer talks about the award, she points out how hard that combo is to pull off — doing everything from scratch while customers still expect drive-thru speed (USA Today via MSN).
Now think about Iowa’s current fast-food breakfast landscape. Our state’s most beloved breakfast item comes from a gas station. Don’t get me wrong — I love Casey’s breakfast pizza like the rest of you, and I’ve written about it before. But when the regional high-water mark for breakfast is served next to the pump, that’s not a breakfast scene. That’s a breakfast vacancy.
A Deathbed, a Farm, and a Biscuit Recipe
Here’s where it gets good — and here’s where Iowa enters the chat.
The story, which the family swears is true: in the mid-1960s, a grandmother in the South named Irma Rue Bass — everyone called her Nanny — was dying. She called her two grandsons, Maurice and R.B. Jennings, to her bedside and told them to divide her estate. One of them could take her small farm near Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The other could take her secret scratch-made buttermilk biscuit recipe (Mashed).
Each grandson picked one. R.B. took the farm. Maurice took the recipe (Business North Carolina).
Stop and sit with that for a second, because if you grew up in Iowa, you know exactly how heavy that moment is. That’s not a business decision. That’s a family deciding which piece of the grandparents survives. Every farm family in this state has some version of that conversation — the estate meeting, the auction, the son or daughter who keeps the ground and the one who takes something else. We are a state built on exactly that kind of inheritance math.
Maurice, a former flour salesman, took the recipe and ran. He’d opened a couple of bread-and-milk stores in Burlington, North Carolina in 1966, which became pizza joints called Pizzaville. Mornings were slow, so he tested Nanny’s biscuits at breakfast. The biscuits outsold the pizza so badly that by 1975 he scrapped the pizza and opened the first standalone Biscuitville in Danville, Virginia (Business North Carolina). The man pivoted an entire restaurant chain because of a recipe his grandmother handed down on her deathbed.
Sixty years later, they still use that same three-ingredient recipe (Biscuitville). The son, Burney Jennings, took over in 1996 — after starting at the company at age 16 mopping floors — and the grandson, Blake, is now Chief Development Officer. Three generations, one recipe, still family-owned, still refusing to franchise (Business North Carolina).
Tell me that family wouldn’t understand Iowa.
We Are Literally the Breakfast Pantry of America
Now the practical case, and it’s a landslide.
Biscuitville hand-cracks its eggs and its signature sandwich is the Ultimate Country Ham Biscuit. So what does that menu need? Eggs and pork. What does Iowa produce more of than any other state in the union? Eggs and pork.
Iowa farms rank No. 1 nationally in corn, pigs, and eggs — all at the same time (Iowa Farm Bureau). Nearly one-third of all the hogs in the United States are raised in Iowa (Iowa Pork Producers). We’re not talking about “well, you could source ingredients here.” We’re talking about the single most egg-and-pork-dense real estate on the continent.
And Biscuitville’s whole sourcing philosophy is buying from local, family-owned businesses whenever possible — because, in their words, local means fresh and family-owned means recipes and relationships (Biscuitville). Iowa is wall-to-wall family-owned farms and small-town food businesses that would bend over backward to land a 90-store (soon-to-be-larger) client.
A chain obsessed with fresh ingredients, setting up shop in the state that grows them? That’s not expansion. That’s a supply chain coming home.
Yes, I Know How They Expand. Hear Me Out.
Here’s the honest objection: Biscuitville grows slowly, on purpose. They’ve said they plan to focus on their existing markets for the next several years, with hopes of eventually moving into Tennessee and Georgia (USA Today via MSN). They get four or five calls a week from investors wanting to buy them, and they stopped answering the phone (Business North Carolina). They don’t franchise. They open stores where people already know them.
Fine. Then let’s make them known.
That’s what this post is: the opening pitch. Biscuitville, you are a family that bet on a grandmother’s recipe over the family farm. Iowa is a state full of families who’ve made that exact bet — on land, on livestock, on recipes at church potlucks — for 175 years. You make everything from scratch and source from family farms. We ARE the family farms. You want competition for McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. We have nothing but open lanes and hungry commuters on Highways 20, 30, and the I-80 corridor.
Put one in Des Moines. Put one in Ames. Put one in Fort Dodge and I will personally be there at 6 a.m. for the first batch of biscuits off the line.
Nanny Bass chose a recipe that fed three generations. Give Iowa the chance to prove it can feed the fourth.
Alright, Iowa — You’re the Jury
I made the case. Now it’s your turn. If Biscuitville ever took the call from Iowa, where should the first one go? Vote below — one vote per person, and yes, I’ll be watching the results like a hawk.
Poll not loading? Vote directly at strawpoll.com/bVg8BOA1ryY.
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