https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/fried-chicken-sandwich-food-culture/682618/
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.