Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and Wingstop have both sold primarily chicken for their entire existences, but for the most part, that’s where the comparison has ended.
Wingstop is a newfangled, takeout chicken wings chain. Popeyes has sold chicken-on-the-bone with a bit of a kick. But they weren’t necessarily considered direct competitors.
Wingstop largely competed with Buffalo Wild Wings and other wing chains and, to a lesser extent, the pizza business.
Popeyes, on the other hand, has largely competed against KFC, Church’s, Bojangles and similar bone-in chicken concepts.
These days, however, the two chains find themselves going head-to-head more often, first over chicken sandwiches and, more recently, for Wingstop’s core menu offering of chicken wings.
The evolution of the two chains is a sign of the restaurant industry’s competitive dynamics. Demand for chicken has soared in recent years among consumers, but how those consumers consume that chicken has itself changed. That has forced companies to adapt their menus, both to meet that competitive dynamic and to adapt to the impact that dynamic has made on the cost structure.
First, let’s talk Popeyes. The Miami-based chicken chain has been on a roll for years, as it improved its marketing and franchisees improved operations. That took the brand from a regional concept and turned it into a national force. Today it is larger than its traditional rival KFC, something that was unthinkable just a decade ago.
Yet it has long specialized in bone-in chicken, which has generally fallen out of favor with consumers. (See Bojangles, which is expanding with a concept that largely eliminates that bone-in chicken.)
In 2019, the Restaurant Brands International-owned concept came out with its chicken sandwich, which helped it generate the strongest quarterly same-store sales for a publicly traded restaurant chain in history.
The sandwich bolstered unit volumes, giving the brand a business at lunch it never really had, while opening it to markets it could never consider before. It also ignited the Chicken Sandwich Wars, luring other chains into the market.
And it paved the way for Wingstop’s own move into sandwiches. The wing chain had a problem of its own: wing costs.
Chicken wing prices are remarkably volatile, with record prices one year followed by low prices the next. But generally they tend to be more expensive, as more brands have started selling wings. So, Wingstop began pushing to expand its menu to sell more boneless options. And in 2022 it introduced a line of chicken sandwiches with flavorings it uses for wings.
It worked. When the chain launched the sandwich, 30% of its sales mix was boneless chicken. Today it’s 50%, CEO Michael Skipworth said on my podcast this week. “We’re becoming a more balanced purchaser of poultry with our supplier partners,” Skipworth said. (You can check out the transcript here.) “And for the first time ever as a brand, we’re able to look out into 2024 and tell our brand partners what they can expect from a food cost perspective.”
But it also generated a lot of new business. System sales at the chain soared 27% and same-store sales rose a ridiculous 18.3% for the full year. Wingstop officially had the second-best introduction during the Chicken Sandwich Wars.
Alas, Popeyes has not stood still. The brand in December added a five-selection menu of chicken wing flavors to its menu permanently. The brand believed it could quickly become a major player in the chicken wing market. And it, too, was correct.
The company used a Super Bowl ad to tell the world that it sold wings. And it is already the No. 3 player in the quick-service wing market. “We’re all really excited about chicken wings at Popeyes,” RBI CEO Josh Kobza told investors in February.
Wingstop itself is not afraid of Popeyes’ entrance into the wing market. “I’ve seen other brands over the years put wings on the menu,” Skipworth said. “And historically what we’ve seen is it’s a tailwind for our business because they’re driving wings as top-of-mind.”
Nevertheless, the Wingstop-Popeyes competition will be an interesting one to watch this year. And probably next.