McDonald’s officially started selling its McCrispy Strips nationwide on Monday. It’s the first new permanent item to hit the fast-food giant’s menu in four years. And it marks a return of sorts of chicken tenders to the company’s product offerings, five years after they were removed in a pandemic-related purge.
Yet it also represents the company’s third effort to convince U.S. consumers that its restaurants are the places to go for a chicken tenders-like product. Neither of its first two efforts would last.
The company removed Chicken Selects in 2013. It then started selling Buttermilk Crispy Tenders in 2017, only to remove those three years later.
There’s more at stake this time around. McDonald’s sales are struggling amid general industry challenges. System sales were flat last year, while the company just reported its worst same-store sales number since the pandemic.
Yet chicken chains, and especially those that deal in the handheld variety, have flourished since McDonald’s ridded its menu of Buttermilk Crispy Tenders. Limited-service chicken chain sales grew 9% last year, based on data from the Technomic Top 1,500. But sales by fast-casual chicken chains grew 24%.
That’s largely thanks to Raising Cane’s and Wingstop, the two fastest growing Top 50 chains. Both grew sales more than 30% last year and have more than tripled in size since the end of 2019. The two chains have each added more than $3 billion in annual system sales over the past five years.
But there is a host of high-growth chains pushing to serve the chicken market. Five of the 11 fastest-growing chains on the Technomic Top 1,500—basically the entire restaurant chain universe—sold chicken. That includes Big Chicken (up 146.5%), Houston TX Hot Chicken (105.8%), Hangry Joe’s Hot Chicken (87.5%), Waldo’s Chicken and Beer (70.1%) and Layne’s Chicken Fingers (67%).
McDonald’s has long been an underrated seller of chicken. Worldwide, the company sells $25 billion worth of chicken every year, or about the same amount that it does beef. By comparison, KFC’s total global system sales last year was $34 billion.
Customers have long been able to get a variety of chicken products in other markets. McDonald’s in Singapore, for instance, sells chicken wings and bone-in chicken in addition to chicken sandwiches. McDonald’s in the U.K. has a selection of chicken wraps and salads in addition to sandwiches.
In the U.S., the company has been saying for years that it wants to sell more chicken. But its last effort, the chicken tenders, didn’t sell well enough for the restaurants to keep them on the menu.
The company started changing that in 2021 with the introduction of an upgraded chicken sandwich, now known as the McCrispy. It began sending out stronger signals of a bigger push on chicken last year, when it finally brought stateside its Chicken Big Mac, which has been popular in other global markets.
“It’s such an important category,” CFO Ian Borden told analysts last year, according to a transcript on the financial services site AlphaSense. “Globally, it’s twice the size of beef as a category, so it’s much larger. It’s growing faster than beef.”
And, he added, “We are underindexed in our share of the market.”
McDonald’s this time has the brand it believes can drive those sales. The McCrispy sandwich is a $1 billion-plus global brand for the chain. The strips are an extension of that brand.
Whether it works remains to be seen, but at the very least the strips will pave the way for another new chicken item later this year, wraps, which were discontinued in 2016. Consumers have been pushing for their return for years.
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