The Brunch Test

Theory #16 | A framework for building products that balance familiarity with freshness.

The word “brunch” first appeared in print circa 1895 in Hunter’s Weekly magazine. The author, Guy Beringer, proposed brunch as a lighter fare alternative to the usual post-church Sunday lunch. What is this if not the best review ever:

“Brunch is a hospitable meal; breakfast is not. Eggs and bacon are adapted to solitude; they are consoling, but not exhilarating. They do not stimulate conversation. Brunch, on the other hand, is cheerful, sociable, and inciting … It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs.”

But what does brunch have to do with building products, you might ask. For one, brunch is a great consumer product (and a very social one). Yes, it’s a derivative of breakfast and lunch, but it’s much more than either one alone or put together.

Hence the analogy: the best new products don’t just offer us breakfast + lunch, they offer us brunch. This is core to what I call The Brunch Test — a simple framework for building products that balance familiarity with freshness.

The 4 Pillars of The Brunch Test

What makes brunch stand out from breakfast and lunch? This is a relative question — the ‘brunch test’ is in a sense a relative test.

Does the new product feel sufficiently different from predecessors, from the recognizable building blocks, or primitives?¹ From modern day substitutes, the thing your target user already knows and uses? Or does it just feel like a mashup of the familar (and worse than each alone)?

Brunch distinguishes itself in a few ways, lending to the 4 pillars of The Brunch Test:

#1 — It has a distinct use case

First, brunch is a ritual social event, and rituals aren’t just utilitarian; they have meaning beyond the act itself. It’s not just a meal, it’s a deliberate, emotion-filled occasion for weekends, holidays, and the like. It has more specific, unique use cases too — bougie brunch, recovery brunch, post-wedding brunch. Sometimes the distinct use case comes from serving a distinct user (e.g. a post-wedding brunch serves a different user than say a post-church brunch).²

#2 — It has unique features

Like any good ritual, brunch has it’s own set of customs. A great brunch menu doesn’t just feature breakfast and lunch items; it’s curated with foods that are a bit more intricate, extravagant, blending sweets and savories — eggs benedict, french toast, chicken & waffles. Then there are the signature drinks — mimosas, bellinis, espresso martinis. Brunch falls in that sweet spot of the day where you can wake up without an alarm clock, say from 10 to 2.