Name: US vs Mexico KFC | Food Wars | Insider Food
Uploaded: 2025-02-22T17:00:05.000Z
Duration: 23 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

From calorie counts to portion sizes we're going to find out the difference between KFC USA and Mexico. This is Food Wars.

In Mexico, our KFC chicken comes in 10 different portions. We have one piece, two pieces, three pieces, four pieces, six pieces, and then we move on to the buckets.

Adverbs of manner

Actually, let me tell you something, we have a bigger portion than the one in USA.

Here we have the buckets. We have one with eight pieces, we have 12 pieces, we have 15 pieces, 16 pieces, and our biggest, 18 pieces. 18 piece looks awesome and I am jealous,

Pancho. That's very impressive. I guess technically you can get any number of pieces you want in these combos, but still an 18 piece, mwah, I love it. You get one piece on its own a la carte, then you can get a two, three, and four piece all with a combo, which of course includes a side, a biscuit, and a drink. If that's enough chicken for you, you can upgrade two buckets. You give yourself an eight piece. Oh.

That is so gross. I actually want to try one. Let's just do this one.

These are my favorites. Let's try it. It looks crunchy. Let's go.

It's actually very good. I haven't eaten it today. It's super juicy. It's crunchy.

I feel like you guys can hear it. It's good. While I'm here.

With grease as it looks, man, KFC is undefeated.

In Mexico, you can get the chicken nuggets on five different portions. You have six pieces, eight pieces, 12 pieces, 25 pieces, and 35 pieces. Here we have one, two, and that's it.

They messed up our order, so we just have, I guess, the 35 and the 25.

Here in the U.S., they delivered all of the nuggets, and I am totally stoked. I love the nuggets here in the U.S. Five size options. You got the five piece, the eight piece, the 12 piece, the 36 piece. Get a load of this, Mexico. The 50 piece. This, I love this so much. I didn't realize we had this until today, ordering this food. This is me, Sunday morning, hungover, on the couch, laptop by my chest, watching YouTube, staring through the screen, just going to town on this. Here we go. Okay, that's a lot of chicken nuggets.

And there's something weird here. Like, can you see the colors? This is like brown, and this is like light brown. So, I don't know. It shouldn't be like different flavors. Let's just try it. I feel like they actually overcooked this. KFC used to have popcorn chicken, and then they got rid of that and started doing nuggets. This is the size of a nugget. I don't remember how big or small a popcorn chicken was. I don't know exactly size-wise when a piece of chicken stops being popcorn and becomes a nugget. Either way, we have nuggets now.

And they are so good. In Mexico, you can find the fries in four different portions.

We have papa chicas, that is small, and it's actually very small. There's like five fries in there. Can you see them? Then we have papas medianas, what is medium. It's a little bit more fries, like six more fries. Then we go to the grandes, what is big, big fries. It's a little bit better. Then we have the family size. Oh, familiar. That's how you say it in Spanish.

Looks good. It has one ketchup, only one ketchup for all these. Our fries, two sizes, the individual and the large. Now we're going to weigh the family size. One more.

That is 285 grams. Ours weighs 293 grams. KFC doesn't get enough props for the fries. These fries, ooh, so good. Here we have our Kentucky chicken sandwich mayo. Actually, it's pretty big.

I'm surprised. Let's put it here. 329 grams. Wow. Actually, from all the things that I tried today, this is my favorite. The bread is good. I like it a lot. And of course, this work of art right here is the KFC chicken sandwich. Crispy, delicious. And ours weighs 255 grams.

No. All right. Okay. Mexico, you got a heartier sandwich. That's fine.

But I think 255 grams for one sandwich is pretty nice.

Here's everything you will find at KFC Mexico, but not in the USA.

Here's everything at a KFC in the US you won't find in Mexico.

In Mexico, besides the secret recipe, you can find four different flavors.

We have the cruji. We have the spicy barbecue that is over here. We have the habanero.

And we have the jalapeño. Let's try the cruji. Looks crispy and juicy.

Very good. I'm going to try the spicy barbecue.

Very good. It's like sweet, but spicy. But it's actually very good. Should we try this one?

This is the habanero. It's definitely more spicy than the other one that I tried.

I feel like I like this one because I like spicy, spicy things. I feel like you guys missing out in USA. You guys should put this on the menu. I would love to try that spicy barbecue and habanero chicken. That looks amazing. It probably isn't that much harder to make in the US than it is in Mexico. Whatever you guys do in Mexico, just send those spices or sauces up, please. I want to try that habanero chicken so bad.

We have three-ish exclusive chicken types, flavors, chicken styles here in the US.

Two that are location specific would be the grilled chicken and the hot and spicy.

Now the grilled is obviously what you know grilled chicken looks like. The hot and spicy,

I have had it before. It's not very spicy or hot. It was pretty good. I do like it. I wish it was available here in Southern California. But one thing that we do have that is throughout the country that is maybe similar to what you guys have, but not really. This is our extra crispy.

I love the extra crispy. Actually, I think it was up to me. This would be the default. And if you want it less crispy or less fun, you can get what you saw before. The crispy, just listen to this crisp. Fantastic flavor. I love it. Fun fact. In Mexico, most people refer to KFC as Kentucky

Fried Chicken. We don't usually say KFC. We always say Kentucky Fried Chicken.

So these are my favorite. These are the quetiras. It's pretty much the chicken, how do you say it in English? The chicken tenders. Yeah, we call it quetiras. It's like super popular here in Mexico. Everybody loves quetiras. And we have four different flavors.

We have the classic one, just the regular crunchy. We have the jalapeño, looks spicy.

We have the habanero, looks red. And we have the barbecue. No, I haven't tried the jalapeño.

It tastes a lot like jalapeño. I feel like I just buy the jalapeño. My favorite for sure,

I feel like it should be this one. The habanero. Just because it's crunchy still.

I'm going to try the barbecue now. Just because I like quetiras.

Fourth place, it goes to jalapeño. Third place, I'm going to put the basic one. Then, the habanero rice. And first place, barbecue. My favorite. Your tenders also look amazing.

Those flavors, I want those so bad. You guys are so lucky. Here again, I don't know. We're just going to specifics here. We have an extra crispy option of our tenders. You guys do not. Maybe it's the same as your regular, who knows? Well, could have been the thought that counts, but not very crispy. On to the sandwiches. In Mexico, we actually have a much bigger selection of sandwiches than the USA. We have the Kentucky Chicken Sandwich Chipotle Bacon. We have the Kentucky

Chicken Sandwich Barbecue Bacon. We have the Kentucky Chicken Sandwich Mayo Spicy, the Cruncher and the Big Crunch. We also have the Quetiras Chicken Sandwich, but they forgot to put it in, so we don't have it. Mexico, if you just want to microdose chicken sandwiches, KFC in the U.S.

has you covered. This is the Chicken Little. This one is the Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Guys, I mean, you clearly have spice down over there, but here in the U.S., it's hard to get a really good spicy chicken sandwich.

So good. Chicken, of course, is crispy, cooked perfectly. Enough sauce on here to give it spice, don't make it too overwhelming. I love the bun. I mean, it's fantastic. I've been singing the praise of KFC's chicken sandwiches, both spicy and regular, for years on this show because it's fantastic. It might be the best one you can get in fast food. KFC, ooh, this one, this is still really crispy. All right. Hear that crunch? Yeah. The top two, Popeye's and KFC. And I want to say, at any given day, it could be Popeye's won KFC, too. Those guys are neck and neck.

On to the sides. Well, actually, in Mexico, we have one side that you guys don't have in USA, which is the cheesy fries that I'm showing you a picture right here because we tried to order twice, and for some reason, we didn't get it. So there is a picture. Hopefully, I try someday.

We have sweet corn that you can get. Corn off the cob. Yeah, corn is great. Hey, Mexico, this ridiculous thing in front of me is called a famous bowl. It's a self-proclaimed famous bowl.

Might be more of an infamous bowl. Here's what it is. It's pretty much a combination of all the sides in one thing. This tub is almost filled to the top with mashed potatoes, then covered in gravy. It's already right there. You're like, that's a lot of mashed potatoes and gravy. They didn't stop there. They also put corn on here and chicken nuggets, used to be popcorn chicken, and cheese. And is that everything? Yeah. And I mean, I understand people like all these things assembled on a plate. And I understand that it is kind of hard to eat KFC on the go.

People who want to bring it back for lunch and get a little messy. So I guess I understand why this was invented, but just looks so sad. But let me get a bite of everything.

So it tastes fine. It's all those things I like in a bowl that's kind of weird.

Last thing I'll show off is a pot pie. Look at this, Mexico. Look at this, guys. This is a side.

This is not a side. This is a meal right here. This pot pie is our staple of Southern cuisine.

So you see how Kentucky fried chicken, kind of like on earth. Let's open it up. And inside you have almost like a thick hearty chicken stew almost.

Previous at KFC episodes, I kind of lay into the pot pie, but it's actually growing on me. It's not bad. It's just not even my top 10 things I would get at KFC. In Mexico, we have a few exclusive sauces. So you know what that means. Sauce talk. Sauce talk. We have Texas barbecue, that means smoked chipotle. We have jalapeño, fresa, that is strawberry, mango furioso, which is furious mango, and sweet chili. We also have one that we're missing right here, is the buffalo intensive. Somewhat good news and bad news. The good news is we have three, possibly four exclusive KFC U.S. sauces. The bad news, they only gave me one. So I'll start with this one and then explain the other one. You can get a honey barbecue here in the U.S. It's nice.

It's sweet, a little smoky. Definitely recommend it if you're in the U.S. and want to try it.

Also in the U.S., you can get a side of honey. You also get a hot sauce, which they forgot.

For dessert in Mexico, you can get half a liter or a liter of ice cream, but they didn't have that today because the machine was broken. And you also can get pies, what is apple pie or cheese pie blackberry. Okay, the pie looks like this. It's like a small little baby pie.

Mmm. It's all right. It's sweet, but it's dry. On to desserts. Two exclusive desserts you can get at the KFC in the U.S. The Colonel's homestyle brownie. I'm losing it. It's the chicken and the chocolate chip cake. We've done the cake a million times. Have we done this before? I don't know if I remember. Let me get a little brown edge here. It has this wonderful like gooey texture to it. Wasn't that like too sticky, you know? No. In Mexico, you can find six different types of drinks.

You can find Coca-Cola, Coke Zero, Fanta, Sprite, Cider Almondette, which is apple soda, and Fusti.

Exclusive drinks. In the U.S., our KFC does Pepsi products. Mexico does Coke products. To be honest,

I didn't know about this until yesterday when I put in this order, but currently right now at the KFC, I don't know if this is national or just in my part of the country, but they're adding blackberry flavoring to any one of their fountain drinks, and I'm like, hell yes. The problem is I visually can't tell which are which, so I'm going to go through the hits here and see what's what.

And that's blackberry Pepsi. This one is...

Oh, what is that? You know what this is? This is the Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning and blackberry flavor, and wow. That's a girl. I'm putting that down there. This one right here we have...

I think it's that Pepsi. This blackberry flavoring is like frying my brain. Starry.

Not a big starry guy, but actually that's not that bad.

This might be blackberry starry, yeah. Okay, this one I can tell just by the color is Mountain Dew

Sweet Lightning. I love Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning. I know I have the palate of a 14-year-old boy, but it's great. America, listen to me. I don't know why this is available right now as we're filming this towards the end of March, and I don't know it's gonna be available when this video comes out. So somehow if you have the blackberry edition flavoring to your drinks at your local KFC, do it. The ones that I think I enjoyed were the blackberry lemonade, the blackberry sweet lightning. Hey, the blackberry starry actually did it for me. So if you can add,

I think if you add blackberry to any one of the citrusy ones, it's legit.

Here we have our chicken sandwich combo that comes with a medium drink and medium fries.

This cost 139 pesos. That meal in the U.S. is $10.99. Mexico's biggest menu item, it's the 18 pieces bucket that comes with 18 pieces of chicken, four biscuits, three sides, and a big drink. That cost 639 pesos. Our closest meal to that size is the 16 piece, which comes with only 16 pieces of chicken, four sides, but eight biscuits. And it's $50.99. The two fewer chicken pieces and extra biscuit puts this meal's cost 41% higher than the Mexican meal.

But in the U.S., we have an even more expensive meal. That's the 16 piece tender's meal, which runs $52.99 and includes 16 tenders, four sides, any biscuits, and eight dipping sauces. I don't know if it includes a drink or not, but this is the one I'm drinking. I'm telling you, this blackberry stuff, it's addictive. According to Uber Eats, if we recreate this already in Mexico, it will come up to 1,044 pesos, which is around $61. So how does KFC compare in price to our chicken chains in Mexico? Let's look at Pollo Feliz, which has over 850 branches in Mexico.

At Pollo Feliz, half-roasted chicken with sauce, tortillas, totopos, and a drink cost 196 pesos.

As similar in KFC, the three-piece combo, it costs 125 pesos, a 36% decrease in price. In Mexico, the average salary as of 2023 was around $349,000 or $20,340 a year, which breaks down to $29,200 or $1,695 per month. So the average Mexican consumer will probably choose a less expensive meal, especially when over 36% of Mexicans are living in poverty as of 2022.

I feel like KFC in Mexico will look at it like just like fast food, regular fast food, fried chicken. I feel like it will go like cheap option. I feel like KFC in Mexico, if you compare with other chains, it will come on like USA option. Because here we have Pollo Feliz, but I feel like it's more Mexican. Like for me, in specific, I feel like it doesn't feel like real chicken.

I don't know if that makes sense, but when I was little, my mom was always buying Pollo Feliz or like homemade chicken, stuff like that. So I feel like for me, KFC, it feels a little bit like plastic. I feel like KFC is trying to adapt to the Mexican market, adding all the sauce, like, for example, the jalapeno, the habanero. It's getting the spice, I guess. It's pretty good, actually. But still, I don't feel like it feels real Mexican food. In the U.S., KFC is dominating when it comes to locations. If you compare it to the other two competitive chicken restaurants,

Popeyes and Chick-fil-A, KFC is 4,349 locations. Popeyes has 3,138 locations and Chick-fil-A is 3,059 locations. However, if you look at market share for each of these franchises, it's actually the quite opposite. In 2023, Chick-fil-A was number one with Popeyes and then KFC. You should be comparing Chick-fil-A to like McDonald's and Burger King, which it is still holding its own. But I think KFC, Popeyes, they're a different animal, in my opinion.

Convenience-wise, I think it's pretty convenient. I mean, I love fried chicken and there's plenty of standalone independent fried chicken places here in LA. But with KFC, I mean, you're getting a lot quicker than a lot of these places. Is it better or worse than those? Hard to say. It's good for what it is. It's fast food. KFC's menu is weird. Ever since the pandemic, they've been taking things off of the menu without telling anyone and putting other things on the menu without telling anyone.

If you watch the KFC episodes that we've done, I think the first one we did was in 2020.

They had popcorn chicken. That's gone. Now they have nuggets. Yeah, the nuggets are good. They had wings. Those are gone, which is nuts. Why they don't have wings? I mean, come on.

I would love to see a little more innovation with KFC. I think it's maybe one of the reasons why they're not doing so hot anymore, guys. But yeah, so whenever they changed the menu, it was just like, whatever. In the U.S., how you get your chicken affects the amount of calories you consume. Let's use a breast, for example, in four different skin styles. On average, the calorie amount for a Kentucky grilled breast, 210 calories. If you did the spicy crispy, it'd be 350 calories. An original breast, 390 calories, but an extra crispy breast would be 530 calories. Yes, that much more. The extra crispy has 152% more calories than the Kentucky grilled. One piece of chicken contains 1,150 milligrams of sodium, which is 50% your daily recommended intake. I do believe it. I've been picking bites of chicken and it is very salty.

Let's make it a meal. I'm going to do a three-piece, extra crispy, two breasts and a wing, fries, and a medium Pepsi. The total is 1,800 calories and the sodium of this is 3,800 milligrams.

Ooh, that's a salty meal. Unfortunately, it's hard to find the nutritional info from KFC Mexico, but we find a third-party site that provides that information for some of the items. First, the chicken. For the original recipe, breast is 320 calories. A leg, on average, is 120 calories.

If we make it a three-piece meal with mashed potatoes and a cove, it comes up to 1,080 calories.

In the U.S., our original recipe chicken has all of these ingredients and our fries have a lot of stuff as well. KFC Mexico does not provide ingredient info. Maybe you noticed that one ingredient that we're missing is corn. Well, U.S. corn. Mexico said last year they will no longer import corn from U.S.A. and Canada. Mexico has already banned to grow genetically modified corn.

Recently, Mexico also banned GMO corn from being imported. About 90% of corn grown in the U.S.A.

is genetically modified. So... Hey, we eat it here all the time and we're fine, but whatever.

The ban specifically targets corn meant for human consumption. Animal feed is still allowed as of September 2023. We know that Mexico can grow its own corn, and the assumption is that

KFC in Mexico would use Mexican corn, right? At this point, I'm purely speculating, but perhaps

KFC or Yum Brands has yet to strike a deal with Mexico's corn distributors. Who knows, but as of the writing and shooting of this video, there is no corn on Mexico's KFC menu. I have to say this spork, this whole thing, spork, we think it's a great, it's a terrible idea. All it is is a decent fork, not a great fork, and a borderline useless spoon. Nothing, no broths, no soups, nothing liquidy is staying in this, so that's out. And anything you could that's thick enough to stay in this would stay with the fork as well, right? No point, just forks is fine.