How the Chicken Sandwich Conquered America

The Atlantic

10-05-2025

The sun is setting on burger dominance. Photo-illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom
You would have been forgiven, in 2019, for thinking that America could not possibly get more fanatical about fried-chicken sandwiches. This was the year Popeyes—a fast-food company previously known for bone-in chicken—lost the bones, added a bun (and some pickles and mayo), and set off a complete frenzy. Within days, Popeyes sold out of the sandwiches; after the chain reintroduced them permanently, its sales increased 42 percent compared with the same period of the previous year. Plenty of other restaurants had offered fried-chicken sandwiches before, but I remember this one like it was the Super Bowl, or a natural disaster: massive, bad for traffic, all anyone seemed to be talking about. That December, The Washington Post declared 2019 the Year of the Chicken Sandwich, which the paper translated into Latin—anno pulli—presumably so time travelers from the past could understand what was going on here. As a society, we had reached peak fried-chicken sandwich.
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LOL. Not even close. If, six years ago, the fried-chicken sandwich was a novelty worth standing in line for, today it is a fact of eating in America. From 2019 to 2024, fried-chicken-sandwich consumption increased 19 percent at American restaurants, while burger consumption dropped 3 percent, according to industry analysis firm Circana. Over that same period, some 2,800 fast-food and fast-casual spots devoted to chicken cropped up across the country—and about 1,200 burger joints disappeared.
This is a challenge to the hierarchy that has ruled American fast food since it was invented: Burgers were the core product, and when fried chicken was available at all, such as at KFC, it tended to come bone-in, or as nuggets or tenders or 'popcorn.' Nick Wiger, who with Mike Mitchell hosts a comedy podcast about fast food called Doughboys, doesn't remember eating many fried-chicken sandwiches when he was growing up in Southern California, in the '80s and '90s. To the degree that he did, he told me, they 'were like the add-on sandwich, the bonus sandwich'—the sideshow to the main event, which was usually a hamburger.
That started to change when Chick-fil-A—the Atlanta-based chain that, for years, claimed to have invented the fried-chicken sandwich—began to expand nationwide. People really loved what Chick-fil-A was selling: In 2019, it became the third-largest restaurant chain in the country by sales, even without operating on Sundays. In July 2019, before the Popeyes craze, a group representing McDonald's franchisees argued in a letter that the company needed a superior fried-chicken sandwich. 'JFK called for a man on the moon,' it wrote. 'Our call should be a category leading chicken sandwich.'
Read: As American as fried chicken
McDonald's released the McCrispy in 2021, and now sells at least a billion dollars' worth of it annually. Burger King offers five different fried-chicken sandwiches; Wendy's has nine. Wingstop, which had previously been so known for a different form of chicken that it's right there in the name, also now sells a fried-chicken sandwich.
Fried-chicken mania may have been set off by the major fast-food chains, but it has gone wide. When Wiger visited a slice shop in Los Angeles recently, he was surprised—but not that surprised—to see a fried-chicken sandwich on the menu. 'It's now become an expectation that any place you can get solid food in America will have a fried-chicken sandwich,' he told me. Photo-illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom
Indeed, chefs—including those who are better known for Michelin stars or James Beard Awards—have turned the fried-chicken sandwich into something elevated and even a little winking. They've smothered it in Kaluga caviar, cloaked it in salted duck-egg yolk, and sold it with a claw still attached to the meat for $19 a pop. For decades, the fried-chicken sandwich was an also-ran, and then it was a meme, and now it is America's favorite thing to do with meat and bread.
Chick-fil-A did not, to be clear, invent the fried-chicken sandwich. One popular theory holds that fried chicken was brought to the U.S. by Scottish immigrants; enslaved people, and later free Black cooks, perfected the seasoning and preparation of the dish. Much more recently, fried chicken was put between a bun by some unknown genius, popularized by enterprising businesspeople, reimagined by a polyglot food culture, and made ubiquitous by the collision of a few significant trends in American dining.
Read: Better than southern fried chicken?
Fried-chicken sandwiches are particularly well suited to the ways Americans like to eat—in general, but especially recently. Eating in one's car has become far more common than it used to be, and sandwiches are car food. We tend to be pretty squicked-out by bones, Paul Freedman, the author of American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way, told me, and we love crunch. (This is in notable contrast with, for example, parts of East Asia, which go nuts for chewiness.)
We also really love chicken. During the second half of the 20th century, per capita chicken consumption in the United States quadrupled. Emerging wisdom about the dangers of fat and cholesterol, and the ascendancy of diet culture, pushed health-conscious Americans away from beef and pork and toward poultry. New breeding techniques (and abysmal living conditions) for chickens made the meat less expensive. The world was also becoming aware of climate change, and chicken is significantly less resource-intensive than beef. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Generation Z, the cohort that analysts told me is driving the fried-chicken-sandwich boom, has never not known climate dread.) By the time Popeyes released its sandwich, chicken consumption outstripped that of beef. Even when it is prepared in a way that is not, by any stretch, healthy, and even though eating animals is not good for the planet, full stop, chicken was—is—now our default meat.
And here's the thing about fried-chicken sandwiches: They taste amazing. Here's the other thing: They are highly annoying to cook at home—splattery, stinky, stressful for the uninitiated, impractical to make in small amounts. Fried-chicken sandwiches are just much better suited for restaurant kitchens, with their economies of scale; their giant, ever-burbling deep fryers; and their cooks' hardy, pre-scarred forearms. They're smart business, too. Pound for pound, a decent fried-chicken sandwich is much less expensive to make in a restaurant than a hamburger. Chicken is (for now) cheap, or at least cheaper than beef, and breading and frying make even low-quality meat taste pretty good.
From the May 1982 issue: Roy Blount Jr. on chickens
So does sauce. American eaters have become accustomed to, and expectant of, the opportunity to customize everything. This is why ordering from Starbucks feels like taking the MCAT, and another reason fried chicken is so appealing—it's a relatively bland meat that takes well to being dressed a gazillion different ways. Case in point: Wingstop's crispy chicken sandwich is available with a choice of 14 sauces, plus four dips. When it first came out in 2022, the chain sold more than a million sandwiches in six days.
This, really, is the key to fried chicken: It is an ideal blank slate for a novelty-obsessed food culture. Although fried chicken can be an absolute party, texturally speaking, it doesn't have much to offer, flavorally speaking, at least not without additions. This isn't a weakness; it's a strength. 'Americans are ornament-, garnish-, kick-it-up-a-notch-oriented,' Freedman told me. (We have become less spice-averse in the past generation or so.) Fried chicken works with all manner of trend and cuisine. Right now you can find a Bolivian fried-chicken sandwich, marinated in South American beer and served with serrano-habanero-chili vinegar, in New York City; a Cambodian one with pickled papaya and long beans in Chicago; and a Thai-inspired one served with your choice of Southeast Asian–style sauces in Glendale, Arizona.
The fried-chicken sandwich is one of the great American inventions—a holy mash-up of tradition and newness, convenience and indulgence, crunchy and soft. It is the perfect food for this culinary moment. But wherever we trend next, it will be there, too, because the fried-chicken sandwich can be whatever we want it to be.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline 'How the Chicken Sandwich Conquered America.' When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Ellen Cushing is a staff writer at The Atlantic.