Wendy’s is investing a lot of money because of customer complaints of dry, “rubbery” chicken. $30 million dollars to be exact. The fast food chain has decided that enough is enough. It’s working with chicken processors and suppliers to the shrink the size of its chickens by as much as 20%.
As we mentioned before, in the last 100 years, the size of (and the way we breed) chickens has changed dramatically. Broiler chickens (the most common form of chicken) weighed under three pounds in the early 20th century. Now, these birds are more genetically enhanced than A-Rod.
Modern day chickens have been pumped up to just over six pounds. We think of chicken as a lean meat with much less fat than red meat, but that’s no longer the case. These genetically modified chickens are full of white stripes of fat. On top of that, the bigger the poultry gets the more rubbery, stringy and dry the meat will be. That doesn’t make for a very satisfying chicken sandwich now does it?
Wendy’s hopes that the smaller chickens will yield juicier, tender, more flavorful chicken. It’d better be because they are spending an awfully large amount of money to fix their chicken problem. “It’s about the texture and how juicy it is,” Gail Venrick senior director of protein procurement for Wendy’s told BusinessInsider.
Rival McDonald’s has already taken steps to make its own chicken healthier. At the end of the summer, the company announced that it would gradually phase out all antibiotic injected chicken over the next two years. It’s not illegal for chicken farmers to inject chickens with antibiotics, of course, but it’s usage is concerning because humans are becoming more and more resistant to certain vaccines. Plus, the tide of human-driven marketing has turned way against the practice.
“More than ever, people care about their food – where it comes from, what goes into it and how it’s prepared,” said Mike Andres, the president of McDonald’s USA said in a press release in August.
Obviously, Wendy’s and McDonald’s aren’t the only fast food restaurants who have had problems with rubbery, bland chicken in the past. The whole industry seems to be full of this genetically-enhanced, super chicken. Let’s hope the changes these companies are making will lead to others falling in line as well. If Major League Baseball can get it’s drug injection problem in order, so can the fast food industry.
