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Fast Food Joints Are Flocking to Offer More Chicken
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
As consumers push back against recent menu price hikes, chicken is gaining appeal in the fast food world.
Chicken has always been less expensive for restaurants than beef — at least going back to the early 1980s, when McDonald’s introduced McNuggets. The gap widened last year, with government data showing that beef prices rose 8.6% while the cost of chicken only ticked up 1.3%.
Now, as consumers push back against recent menu price hikes, chicken continues to gain appeal in the fast food world.
Cost isn’t the only factor: Chicken tends to be popular among younger people who see it as a healthier option compared to beef, and the dipping sauce combinations are highly marketable. (You want fry sauce with that?)
Chains that specialize in chicken are capitalizing. Raising Cane’s moved up nine spots (from No. 25 to No. 16) in an annual ranking of the top 50 U.S. restaurants based on consumer spending. Wingstop made the second biggest jump, climbing eight spots (from No. 29 to No. 21). Chick-fil-A held onto its third overall position behind second-place Starbucks and first-place McDonald’s, which just rolled out new McCrispy Strips.
In the announcement, the golden-arched fast food juggernaut wrote, “We’ve been listening to our fans on social and beyond, and they have made one thing clear: They want more chicken.”
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.