Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s debut Fresh Baked Buns

Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s are now proofing and baking buns for their premium hamburgers in-house.

Carpinteria, Calif.-based parent CKE Restaurants Inc. said the new Fresh Baked Buns will be the standard carriers of the chains’ Thickburgers and Six Dollar Burger lines. The buns will be available systemwide, across 1,402 Carl’s Jr. and 1,974 Hardee’s locations, by Nov. 14, the company said.

The new buns arrive in restaurants as raw, frozen dough balls, which are proofed and baked in-house, chief marketing officer Brad Haley said. They're denser and slightly sweeter than the current buns, and are meant to bring out the flavor of the charbroiled Black Angus beef patties that are used for the premium burgers, according to a press release.

The buns will also be available for standard burgers for suggested surcharge of 30 cents.

“We sell a lot of hamburgers and we would physically not have enough space to make enough buns for all the hamburgers we sell,” Haley said. “We had to limit the breadth of products that we offer them on.”

The addition of the new bun follows the rollout of scratch-made buttermilk biscuits at Carl’s Jr. that necessitated the introduction of ovens. Hardee’s has baked biscuits from scratch for years.

“We were able to leverage the assets we already owned to make a bigger quality statement at lunch and dinner that we already did at breakfast with made-from-scratch biscuits,” Haley said.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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