Chicken Sandwich Wars (Global Impact)

The sandwich that started the fight is short on parts: a buttermilk-battered, hand-breaded chicken fillet, a toasted brioche bun, pickles, and either mayonnaise or a spicy Cajun spread. Popeyes put it on menus across the United States on August 12, 2019, and the company called it its biggest launch in nearly thirty years. Everything about it is built to be eaten fast in a car. The fillet is wider than the bun, so crust hangs over the edge, and the first thing a bite meets is the bun's give, then a shell that cracks audibly and sheds flakes down the front of your shirt.

Buttermilk batter fries into craggy ridges and blisters, and those ridges hold oil and seasoning at the surface, so the heat of the Cajun version hits the lips before the teeth reach the meat. Under it the chicken stays moist and a little salty, and the cold, sharp pickles cut through the fry the way a squeeze of lemon does on a fish plate. The brioche is sweet and buttery enough to soften the pepper, and it compresses against the fillet so the whole thing bites through in one clean pass. Left to sit in its paper, the underside of the crust goes soft within minutes, and a sandwich that has traveled home in a bag is a worse one.

The contest itself ran on Twitter. Chick-fil-A, whose original sandwich is a pressure-fried fillet with pickles on a buttered bun, posted a tweet about its original that outlets read as aimed at Popeyes, and Popeyes answered with a three-word shrug: "... y'all good?" By one meme tracker's count the reply drew more than 280,000 likes in a day. Wendy's jumped in with a jab about which rival had the second-best sandwich, and Popeyes slapped it down with a line about biscuits. Customers who had never thought about Popeyes went to see what the noise was. Orders backed up, drive-through lines ran long, and people posted photos of the empty display case.

Popeyes had forecast that supply would last into the end of September. It lasted about two weeks. On August 27, 2019, the chain tweeted that it was sold out "for now," and for the next several weeks the sandwich existed mainly as a rumor with a price tag. It returned on Sunday, November 3, 2019, as a permanent menu item, and foot-traffic data from Placer.ai showed visits above the peak of the original launch. Within days some stores were reported out of chicken again. Every competitor spent the next two years trying to build that kind of shortage on purpose.

The rivals answered with fillets of their own. McDonald's tested a Crispy Chicken Sandwich in Houston and Knoxville starting in late 2019 and went national on February 24, 2021, in classic, deluxe, and spicy versions. Chains that had sold chicken sandwiches for decades repackaged them with thicker fillets, brioche or potato buns, and pickles on top. The sandwich itself crossed the border more slowly. A Canadian trial planned for April 2020 was pushed back by the pandemic, since a launch built on crowds sat badly with physical distancing; Edmonton-area stores started selling it on June 17, 2020, and the national Canadian rollout came on September 14, 2020, across more than 230 restaurants. Sales figures for all of this vary by source and come mostly from the companies themselves.

Origin and history

Chicken sandwiches on buns long predate 2019, and Chick-fil-A had sold a pickle-topped fillet on a buttered bun for decades before the Popeyes launch. What August 2019 added was a regional fried-chicken chain with a national sandwich, arriving at the moment social media rewarded an exchange of public insults. The dates line up consistently across coverage: the launch on August 12, the Twitter exchange in the days after, the sellout announced on August 27, the relaunch on November 3, and the McDonald's national rollout on February 24, 2021. Outlets disagree on the exact date of Chick-fil-A's first tweet. Claims about who won, or about how many sandwiches sold, come from company statements and trade press and vary in quality.

The sandwich reached Britain two years after the American sellout. Popeyes opened its first UK restaurant on November 20, 2021, in the food court at Westfield Stratford City in east London, with the same buttermilk fillet, brioche, and pickles on the menu, in a food-court unit that KFC had occupied until then.