We live in an extraordinary age of choice.
You can now buy avocado smash on sourdough, topped with micro-greens, drizzled with something cold-pressed, ethically sourced, and emotionally reassuring — all before 9am, and often at a railway station.
There are breakfast bowls. Protein pots. Overnight oats. Activated seeds. Juices with numbers instead of names. Coffee that arrives with tasting notes and a short origin story.
And yet.
The egg sandwich still explodes on the first bite.
Not sometimes.
Not occasionally.
Every time.
Egg escapes out the back. Filling migrates. Gravity takes over. Your shirt becomes collateral damage. A napkin is deployed too late to matter.
I have a beard and a moustache. Depending on the month — and how recently they’ve been trimmed — I may discover remnants hours later.
This is not a new problem. The egg sandwich has been around for decades. Possibly centuries. It has four ingredients and a single job: be eaten without incident.
We have not cracked it.
What we have done is add layers.
More bread options. Brioche. Ciabatta. Sourdough with aspirations. Chilli jam. Aioli. Micro-greens again, because apparently they’re mandatory now.
But the core problem remains untouched.
Because this isn’t innovation. It’s decoration.
We’re very good at making things look new. We’re less good at making them work better. We add features instead of fixing fundamentals. We prioritise novelty over usefulness. We optimise for the menu description, not the moment of truth — the bite.
The egg sandwich doesn’t need disruption.
It needs containment.
And this is where it stops being about lunch.
Because you see the same thing everywhere else. Products launched with fanfare that collapse under light, everyday use. Software that looks incredible in a demo but needs a training course to survive its first week. Strategies that sparkle on slides and disintegrate on contact with reality.
Plenty of excitement. Very little improvement.
We call it innovation because it’s easier than admitting we haven’t solved the obvious.
The real test is brutally simple:
Can a normal human use this, in the real world, without making a mess?
If the answer is no, it doesn’t matter how clever it is. Or how beautifully it’s presented. Or how many ingredients it contains.
The egg sandwich has failed this test for years. Not because it’s hard. But because no one is incentivised to fix the boring bit.
There’s more money in micro-greens.
So yes, celebrate choice. Enjoy the avocado. Marvel at the sourdough.
But don’t confuse more with better.
Progress isn’t adding things.
It’s fixing what’s obviously broken.
Start with the egg sandwich.
Then tell me about your innovation.
Disclaimer: I bloody love an egg sandwich….