Too often a beloved fast food brand will have a great idea and then absolutely botch its rollout. It happened when McDonald’s introduced a way to order popular menu hacks over their app but still expected you to assemble them yourself (thanks McDonald’s for letting us do a thing we were already doing anyway). It also happens each time Taco Bell takes a much-loved menu staple and then just decides to take it away from us. Fast food fails are so common that we’ve written a whole article about the most boneheaded mistakes each have made. This leads us to the latest brand to make a major swing and a miss, Popeyes.
As part of a spring menu update, Popeyes rolled out the new Strawberry Biscuit. Available for a limited time at participating restaurants nationwide, the idea here is simple — infuse Popeyes’ classic buttery biscuits with a delicious touch of sweetness via ripe strawberries. Sounds like a winner right? Well, it turns out that turning a savory side into a delicious dessert is harder than it sounds.
Here are our thoughts on Popeyes’ latest.
Strawberry Biscuit
Tasting Notes:
As soon as I received my strawberry biscuit, I knew I was in trouble. The biscuit is packaged in the same container (a paper cup with a plastic lid) Popeyes puts its side orders in. I realize that is a weird thing to point out, but sugary foods and plastic don’t mix. It’s why a dozen donuts are packaged in a giant pink cardboard box, once sugar meets plastic, it sweats, making your food inedibly soggy.
In the time it took me to get from my nearest Popeyes to my apartment (only eight minutes), my biscuit had already sogged up leaving a sugary residue on my fingers as I picked up the biscuit for my first bite. A common complaint about Popeyes biscuits is that they’re too buttery, that’s not an issue I have with them, bring on the butter, but that original flavor is almost completely drowned out by an intensely sweet and overly perfumed strawberry flavor.
Don’t expect the natural tart brightness of real strawberries. This is straight-up candy, the sort of sugared-up strawberry topping you’d find in strawberry syrup, not an actual berry. There is a thin strip of sugar frosting spread across the top of the biscuit, and the press photo makes it seem luxurious. It’s not. It’s more like someone Zorro’d your biscuit with a whiteout brush. As far as I could tell, the frosting was completely flavorless, but then it was hard to taste anything else aside from candied strawberry.
Biscuits are known for being light, fluffy, and airy, with a satisfying crispy outer but the texture of this biscuit was a lot more like a tiny piece of really cheap cake. It’s a biscuit in name only.
A sweet biscuit isn’t a crazy idea, look at the winning combination of biscuits and honey (or any scone), but what Popeyes did here just doesn’t work.
The Bottom Line:
This “biscuit” takes away everything good about a Popeyes biscuit (the butteriness, the crispy texture) and replaces it with overly candied strawberry flavoring and a soggy texture. Sadly, this is a pretty hard fail.
Find your nearest Popeyes here.
