McDonald's tries its hand at hand-breaded chicken

Years ago, McDonald’s tried chicken wings. The company tested Mighty Wings in Chicago. The product sold well enough that the chain introduced them nationwide in time for the 2013 NFL season.

Fear of the world’s largest restaurant chain selling chicken wings roiled the market. Suppliers hoarded wings, prices soared. And then the product flopped, massively. McDonald’s sales struggled, ultimately paving the way for the departure of CEO Don Thompson.

All of which makes it somewhat curious that McDonald’s would consider such a thing again, at least in the U.S. But here I was, in a Chicago location, eating a rather hefty, crispy chicken wing.

New chicken products

The wings are part of the company’s small test of upgraded, hand-breaded chicken products, along with a new Grilled Chicken Sandwich. The company is intent on competing more directly with specialist competitors, including fast-growing chicken chains like Raising Cane’s and Dave’s Hot Chicken.

The hand-breaded chicken tenders, in particular, seem destined for bigger things. They were a massive hit at McDonald’s recent convention. The company is expanding the test, and it would be an outright shock if they didn’t land on the chain’s national menu at some point in the near future. The tenders we tried were juicy and delicious and we would try them again.

The challenge for McDonald’s and its restaurants is to make these items fast enough to meet consumers’ need for speedy service without detracting from the quality the chain clearly wants.

Operational challenges

The track record of burger chains hand-breading chicken isn’t exactly a good one. Burger King tried that with its Ch’King chicken sandwich, introduced in 2021, but the operational complexity of hand-breading the product on site proved too much for the restaurants. The product flopped. And Burger King’s parent has since spent billions of dollars to revitalize the brand.

McDonald’s believes it has solved this issue by devoting an employee to the task of hand-breading chicken.

McDonald's chicken wings are selling well in test.

But that, in turn, potentially adds to labor in the restaurants, which will put immense pressure on the product to perform from a sales perspective. It will need to generate more sales and traffic from that chicken to make the complexity worth it.

At the same time, McDonald’s has a good argument for this test: Its international restaurants do this perfectly well, so there’s no reason its U.S. locations can’t do the same.

Quality upgrade efforts

It’s also difficult to argue with McDonald’s working to upgrade menu quality. Consumers today are demanding better options from their fast-food restaurants. The company is competing against brands that have well-established quality reputations, and those chains are gaining a lot of ground.

If McDonald’s is going to do something more than simply hold serve on market share, it will need to improve quality. And the chain’s shift to fresh beef Quarter Pounders was a success. So why not hand-bread some chicken?

In addition, the restaurant industry is far different today than it was when McDonald’s introduced those Mighty Wings. More sales are coming through delivery, which is likely what the company is thinking with its dusted-off wing test. And speed is less of a concern with delivery than it is with the drive-thru. Mobile order is also a bigger share of the business. And the chicken chains the company competes against aren’t exactly speedy.

That said, wings will likely prove difficult to execute on a national scale. The wings come in frozen and are thawed for 24 hours before they’re cooked. It takes about 10 minutes to prepare. All of this presents potential operational challenges that could become real problems when everyday restaurants try making them.

The wings themselves were crispy, with the right amount of spice, and the chicken itself was juicy. But the time to prepare could be difficult, and McDonald’s still gets the bulk of its orders through the drive-thru.

The tenders, on the other hand, could prove to be a gamechanger. They’re far superior to the Chicken Strips the company introduced last year and could provide a real boost to Snack Wraps.

In any case, the products appear to be selling well at the test restaurant without any advertising. And they’re getting some real attention on social media. So McDonald’s has plenty of reason to keep testing.