Name: Why Fast-Food Companies Are Going All In On Chicken Tenders
Uploaded: 2025-08-10T16:09:16.000Z
Duration: 10 min 46 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...

I think you're going to have to sit a little tighter to each other.

Shall we? This off the bat looks to be the most breaded of the tenders.

Chicken tenders, also known as chicken strips, chicken fillets or chicken fingers, are having a moment.

Between 2020 and 2024, grocery store sales of the American food staple rose 104 percent. And now fast food chains, struggling with slumping sales, are jumping on the tender bandwagon, too.

In May 2024, they sold about $6 billion of strips.

This is the dance I always do when I'm eating chicken tenders.

I don't eat meat, so I enlisted some of my colleagues to help decide if they're worth the hype and the price tag.

Let's have you all try the same chicken, the first one, the one on the left. In October 2024, number three chicken brand KFC launched a new ad.

The chicken tender battle has just begun.

As if the ad wasn't enough to rile up competitors, on October 17th, the company handed out free strips at what they called carefully selected cities. Those were Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Atlanta.

Also known as close rivals, Popeyes, Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's hometowns. Catherine Tangillespie was hired less than two months prior.

We should we should let people know about that.

This battle is the latest attempt to turn the struggling company around.

KFC's parent company, Yum Brands, reported the chicken chain faced same store sales declines in the first three quarters of 2024.

Between 2014 and 2024, fast food restaurants raised menu prices by an average of 60 percent.

That's nearly double the rate of inflation.

McDonald's and Popeyes rose their prices the most.

And the consumer has responded by pulling back.

KFC, as with many others, has put an emphasis on value as of late.

For me, it's putting our iconic recipe on a really modern product that so many customers want, especially the younger generation.

So we think that's going to do really well for us.

Now even McDonald's, whose chicken sales alone were $25 billion in 2023, is getting in on the action.

When they innovate and do something new, like that is the real indicator that a trend has gone mainstream.

The chicken battle is not new for the chicken chains.

In 2019, Popeyes ignited a chicken sandwich war after its new sandwich was so popular that it eventually helped the company overtake KFC as the number two U.S.

chicken chain. With the chicken sandwich like that overnight, people people wanted it and wanted to compare it against other chains.

But the excitement around chicken sandwiches has peaked.

And now chicken tenders are all the rage.

Yeah, we should have taken like a sniff wine before.

So we took it into our own hands to figure out which brand we thought would win the battle. I'm gonna eat this whole thing.

While a private company, Raising Cane's is the only one that focuses solely on tenders. Founded in 1996, it has more than 840 locations and expects to reach almost 900 by the end of 2024.

It reported its first billion-dollar quarter in Q1 2024, and in its most recent quarter, it grew same-store sales and traffic by double digits.

It's almost meant to take on the flavor of whatever you're dipping it in.

After major chicken players Chick-fil-A, Popeyes and KFC, Barclays ranks it fourth, capturing about 8 percent of the market.

We believe consumers, we call them customers, they're looking for everyday value. They're not looking for a gimmick, and we can deliver that.

So we are pretty bullish about where we are and how we will continue to deliver on that promise.

It's awesome. Wingstop is another major player whose tender offering has proven successful. Some of the smaller tender-focused competitors have also become some of the fastest-growing concepts in America, thanks to the

This one has more flavor than the other one.

This one's the winner. Just from looking at the three pieces of chicken, my guess was this is Chick-fil-A.

restaurants carry chicken tenders, and many are innovating by offering them in other dishes, like in salads, wraps and sandwiches.

Mexican-inspired chain Taco Bell, who shares the same parent company as

Everyone kind of going back to 2019 took that lesson.

They kind of saw like there's so much growth happening here.

Let's go in and get a piece of it ourselves.

According to some reports, the Puritan Backroom Restaurant in Manchester,

New Hampshire, invented the chicken tender in 1974 after its owner wanted to find a use for the one leftover piece of chicken, the tenderloin, the meat closest to the rib cage.

His concept was simple, marinate it, deep fry it and serve it up with some sauce. Simple yet delicious.

A few years later, Burger King took chicken tenders mainstream as a way to compete against McDonald's success with chicken nuggets.

Chicken tenders, real fillets of all white meat chicken breasts, not form bits and pieces of chicken like McNuggets.

They first started off as like more of a kid's menu item.

And I think that is one of the big reasons why adults tend to love them today. How you can get it in kind of an adultified form.

If I'm going to eat out or order food, I want something that's like better than what I would make at home.

And these are better than what I make at home.

Now they're everywhere at schools, birthday parties, gas stations, diners, baseball games, you name it.

Chicken producer Purdue says that with fast food inflation up, sales of its frozen tenders are up 64 percent in 2024 compared to 2020.

You don't need a lot of manpower or have to handle fresh produce like lettuce, tomatoes or bread.

And their versatility allows them to pair with different flavor combinations and sauces, something which also helps drive more sales.

Throw it in your fryer along with the fries you're probably already frying up anyways and call it a day.

From the consumer's point of view, they make sense, too.

They're filling, practical and easy to pick up on the go.

Plus, people perceive them as a healthier alternative to nuggets, which are processed or beef burgers.

And then there's, of course, the nostalgia factor.

I was a kid that would go to like a fancy restaurant and would order chicken tenders. They were a graduation from chicken nuggets, which are for kids.

Chicken overall has been the fastest growing category in the U.S.

consumption was double the amount of beef.

One study showed Gen Z and Gen X prefer chicken tenders, while boomers and millennials ranked them second.

How do you remove the reputation of being a kid's meal?

It's because you can play with nostalgia.

It's the same that McDonald's has done with the adult tech meal.

All these elements, you know, playing with your emotions are ways to be reattracting consumers and make them reconnect with their own childhood.

I would say it would be between this one and the one on the end.

I think this looked like KFC to me because of the breading.

It appears more usually if I go to KFC, I get like a bucket of chicken.

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Why Fast-Food Companies Are Going All In On Chicken Tenders

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