Not Hash Browns Or Waffles: Waffle House's Best Selling Menu Item Might Surprise You

It's all there in the name, isn't it? Waffle House makes a very specific promise to its customers: It's a building, or a "house," if you will, where you can purchase waffles and other hearty breakfast foods to soak up your hangover. (Or, depending on the time of night, you can get into a fight, which is why you might want to avoid Waffle House in the wee small hours of the morning for the best experience.) Surely, waffles are its most popular menu item, right? And if not waffles, then it must be those famous hash browns, the ones responsible for the hash brown code. Not so — in fact, the most popular menu item at Waffle House is a little boringly obvious. What is it? Eggs, of course.

Every year, Waffle House serves about 272 million eggs to hungry customers across America (and mostly across the South). By comparison, Waffle House serves 85 million slices of bacon, 153 million orders of hash browns, and 58 million cups of coffee. (That last number seems a little low at first glance, considering how popular coffee is, but we're not about to argue with Waffle House — not if its representatives fight like its line cooks, anyway.) And since the restaurant chain's founding in 1955, Waffle House has served a mind-boggling number of eggs: more than five billion, with a "b." That's the kind of number that can either feed customers for 70 years, or make one truly historic omelet.

So it's well established that Waffle House goes through a lot of eggs. But those eggs have to come from somewhere, don't they? (Even if we're still not entirely sure if the egg or the chicken came first.) Where do they originate from? Well, in the case of Waffle House, a number of sources are used, but the foremost supplier is Rose Acre Farms, a poultry farm based in Seymour, Indiana.

The name may sound quaint, but although Rose Acre Farms started as a family farm (and remains owned by its founders, the Rust family), it is by no means a mom-and-pop operation these days. In fact, it's the second-largest producer of eggs in America, behind only Cal-Maine Foods of Mississippi. More than half of Waffle House's eggs come from Rose Acre, meaning there's a good chance that those fluffy scrambled eggs you got for breakfast came from Indiana (or one of Rose Acre Farms' seven other facilities across the country).