Welcome to the Fast-Food Industry's Crispy Chicken Summer — WSJ

By Heather Haddon and Patrick Thomas

A deep-fried, golden-brown battle is raging across the country this summer, with your choice of sauces.

Chicken — battered, breaded and served as a sandwich, tender or nugget — has become the fast-food industry's weapon of choice, with industry heavyweights lining up against fast-growing upstarts and billions of dollars in sales on the line.

Taco Bell is developing a whole menu of crispy chicken tacos, burritos and nuggets, and Wendy's is launching new tenders later this year. McDonald's rolled out its own chicken tenders in May, and after the Golden Arches added chicken Snack Wraps back to its menu in July, the hype left some locations short of ingredients.

Chicken-centric chains are plotting to capture more sales, too. Raising Cane's, with its chicken fingers-centric menu, aims to add 100 locations this year. Wingstop in February launched crispy tenders that Chief Executive Michael Skipworth sees opening a new front for the brand.

"There's 1.6 billion chicken tenders served annually and we are a long way from winning our fair share," Skipworth said on a recent investor call.

Poultry has been a better bet than beef for years now in the fast-food industry. Sales at chicken chains grew 8.9% in 2024 compared with the prior year, while burger company sales grew 1.4%, according to market-research firm Technomic. Chicken now delivers more than $53 billion in annual sales for U.S. fast-food restaurants that specialize in poultry.

Chick-fil-A's crispy chicken sandwich — long regarded as the industry standard — helps keep the Atlanta-based chain's multilane drive-throughs humming, and made it the third-biggest U.S. restaurant chain by domestic sales. Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen launched its own version in 2019, kicking off fast food's so-called chicken sandwich wars, and chains from McDonald's to Shake Shack hustled to add their own.

Now the fight is entering a new phase, with added urgency. Tightening cattle supplies have helped lift beef prices to record levels, making chicken a more profitable option for restaurants and meat companies alike.

Meat math

Retail ground-beef prices in July were 11.5% higher than in the same month last year, federal data showed, while chicken prices rose 3.3%. Texas Roadhouse, Portillo's, Shake Shack and other beef-focused chains have said in recent weeks they expect rising cattle costs to take a bite out of profits this year.

Dillon Weaver, a 33-year-old Phoenix resident who works in private equity, makes a point of sampling chicken sandwiches as he comes across them at restaurants, and assigns a ranking to each one. Popeyes and Chick-fil-A score high.

He said he prefers chicken over beef for health and cost reasons, though these days he has a new motivation: "Prices for beef are out of control."

Beef remains king in fast-food overall, with burger joints doing roughly double the business of chicken-centric rivals last year, Technomic said.

Phillip Signey, a 72-year-old retired paralegal from the Los Angeles area, said he isn't a fan of fried chicken. "My fallback at any fast food outlet is a simple cheeseburger."

Crowded coop

Chicken has reigned for years as U.S. consumers' most beloved meat, overtaking beef in domestic per capita consumption in 1993. It has become true for restaurants too, with around 93% of restaurant operators including chicken on their menus, compared with 90% for beef, Technomic said.

Chicken chains are in demand, too. Private-equity firm Roark Capital bought Dave's Hot Chicken for $1 billion earlier this year, while Bojangles is exploring a sale that could value its fried chicken and biscuits at $1.5 billion — which would be three times what it sold for in a 2019 buyout.

McDonald's has established a business unit focused solely on chicken and is gaining market share in its top global markets, executives said. Taco Bell aims to reach $5 billion in annual chicken sales by 2030. "We'll continue to push the envelope on chicken," Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant said in a recent interview.

Wendy's has spent months testing the flavor and preparation of new tenders it plans to launch later this year, along with six dipping sauces. The company envisions the tenders as a building block for future products, and is also testing new sandwich variations.

Popeyes owner Restaurant Brands International said earlier this month that fast food's chicken coop is getting crowded.

"People who are focused on chicken have been feeling everybody else kind of playing in that space," Restaurant Brands Executive Chairman Patrick Doyle said during an investor call earlier this month. That is pushing Popeyes to hasten operational improvements, he said.

Peak poultry?

Fast food's chicken fever is powering a sales boom for meat companies. Tyson Foods, the largest U.S. chicken processor, said earlier this month that operating profit from its poultry business surged nearly 70% to $980 million for the first nine months of the company's fiscal year, the chicken division's most profitable start to a year in nearly a decade.

"I don't think we've peaked in chicken," Tyson CEO Donnie King said on an investor call. Restaurants' appetite has helped the company's yearslong effort to turn around its chicken business, and Tyson is developing new items such as a high-protein, cheesy chicken nugget for grocery stores.

Pilgrim's Pride, which supplies about a fifth of U.S. chicken, said that despite a slowdown in the number of consumers going out to eat, restaurants continue adding chicken to their menus. Pilgrim's recently reported a 16% rise in quarterly operating profit and is spending $400 million to build a new cooked-chicken processing facility in Georgia.

Rival chicken company Wayne-Sanderson Farms is expanding processing lines at its plants to help supply restaurants, and chefs at its Decatur, Ala., test kitchens are working on lemon-pepper chicken sandwiches, new types of nuggets and spicier wings.

Kevin McDaniel, Wayne-Sanderson's CEO, said restaurants are asking for help creating new products and flavors. "Chicken is taking over," he said.

Write to Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com and Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com