McDonald’s is preparing to test hand-breaded chicken menu items in nearly 200 restaurants across the US and Ireland next year, its latest attempt to win back inflation-battered consumers.
The world’s largest fast-food chain has already been selling hand-breaded chicken nuggets, strips and sandwiches across a handful of stores in the Chicago area, as well as 10,000 locations across Asia.
It’s part of McDonald’s plan to snatch market share from competitors like Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane’s, both of which hand-batter and -bread chicken daily in restaurants around the country.
Hand-breaded chicken items are “a significant opportunity to upgrade taste and quality,” executive vice president Jill McDonald said during the company’s investor presentation last week.
But it can be difficult to add fresh breaded chicken to a chain like McDonald’s, whose customers have come to expect speedy service behind the counter, as Bloomberg previously reported. The fresh food requires new equipment, additional workstations and a more complex cooking process.
McDonald’s last week unveiled a multi-year, $8.5 billion spending plan that included a focus on chicken products, as consumers have shunned rising beef prices. The chain aims to gain 1.5 percentage points of market share in chicken products by 2030.
One of the main challenges will be finding room for new equipment in McDonald’s restaurants. The chicken will arrive at restaurants raw, marinated and frozen, so locations will need to add thawing cabinets.
Restaurants also need to add a separate work station for employees to batter and bread the chicken, which will then be sent off to the fryers.
Currently, McDonald’s nuggets arrive at stores breaded, frozen and partially cooked – so all workers need to do is drop the morsels of poultry goodness in a deep fryer and then toss them in cartons.
It takes not only more space, but more time to hand-bread chicken, too.
Workers who handle raw chicken won’t be able to help with other tasks behind the counter, like putting together the sandwiches, because of contamination risks – so the concern is that franchisees will need to ramp up labor hours.
McDonald’s noted that its spending plan – known as “NEXT” – includes improvements in operations and efficiencies. The goal is for labor in McDonald’s locations to be redistributed so restaurants don’t need to add more workers behind the counter to handle the breaded items, the company said.
A new AI program called ArchIQ, which has already been rolled out to 8,000 joints in China, will also take customers’ orders at drive-thrus and “free 50 hours of labor each week,” according to Brian Rice, the company’s executive vice president of technology.
It’s still an uphill battle for the fast-food chain. Burger King, for example, scrapped a hand-breaded chicken sandwich four years ago after it found the recipe entailed too much chaos to implement across restaurants.
McDonald’s said it is working with franchisees to address concerns and that any broader roll-out of the new chicken items depends on the success of the pilot program.
The NEXT program also includes new flavors of Chicken McNuggets and refined cooking times and oil volumes, so existing chicken products on the menu taste even better, according to Jill McDonald.
It’s expected to cost US franchisees about $800,000 to implement the new program changes over several years. McDonald’s will be helping with $8.5 billion in cash and rent breaks, though the level of support will vary by operator.
The company also plans to open another 2,100 restaurants globally this year. McDonald’s currently has more than 13,700 locations in the US, with the vast majority run by franchisees.
It expects the new restaurants to contribute about 2.5% of systemwide sales growth in 2027, and around 2% by 2030.
McDonald’s stock is down more than 23% so far this year.
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