Forget the Chicken Sandwich War. Welcome to the Chicken Tender Economy.
- Aug 4
- 3 min read
Think of it as the sequel nobody asked for but everyone's watching anyway, the chicken sandwich war's louder, saucier younger sibling. And tenders might actually be the stronger business.
Yes, we are absolutely in a chicken tender war.
KFC opened with an actual "battle cry" press release in October 2024, introducing Original Recipe Tenders with an ad campaign so satirical about the whole "chicken wars" concept that it basically wrote this article's headline for me. McDonald's answered by rolling out McCrispy Strips nationwide in May 2025, its first permanent menu launch since 2021, and KFC responded within days by discounting its own tenders and taking a very public swing at "settling for a tender from a burger chain." Meanwhile Chili's has built real momentum around Chicken Crispers and the Triple Dipper, Chick-fil-A is testing spicy strips, and Raising Cane's just quietly built an entire billion-dollar empire around one product and a sauce nobody will explain the recipe for.
Why Everyone Suddenly Wants In
Chicken is simply easier to price than beef, especially with beef costs still elevated. Tenders are portable, familiar across every generation, and built for delivery in a way a burger stack never quite manages. One core product becomes a platter, a wrap, a sandwich, a salad topper, a kids' meal, or a shareable appetizer, real menu flexibility without adding a pile of new ingredients or a single new piece of equipment.
The demand backs it up. Chicken chains grew sales 9.1% in 2024 while the broader restaurant industry limped along at roughly 3%. The category cooled slightly in 2025, down to 5.3% growth, still nearly double the industry average. Raising Cane's alone grew sales 32% in 2024 to almost $5 billion, enough to leapfrog KFC on the industry's largest-chains list. That's not a fad. That's a category quietly rewriting the org chart.
The Real War Isn't About the Chicken
Here's the part most people miss: nobody's actually fighting over the chicken. They're fighting over crunch, sauce, value, and portability, in whatever order keeps a strip crispy after ten minutes inside a delivery bag, which turns out to be the hardest part of the whole equation.
A generic tender is a commodity now, indistinguishable, forgettable, replaceable by whatever's cheapest that week. A real tender system, Cane's sauce nobody can name the ingredients of, KFC's eleven herbs and spices treated like a nuclear launch code, Chili's Triple Dipper turning a side dish into a personality, is a scalable platform. One is a menu item. The other is a moat.
The Real Lesson
The winner of this war won't be whoever fries the chicken best. It'll be whoever builds the most distinctive breading-and-sauce identity and keeps it standing up after a delivery bag, a car ride, and a microwave reheat somebody swore they wouldn't do but definitely did.
Burgers had their decade. Sandwiches had their moment. Tenders might just be the format that finally proves a restaurant category can win on operations as much as flavor.
Last but not least
The chicken tender war has its own “college football” teams, smaller players with serious ambition and plenty of momentum.
Zaxby’s: 1000 restaurants and a proven platform built around chicken fingers, wings, and sauces across 22 states
Slim Chickens: 320+ locations, a large development pipeline, and a flexible tender-based menu, with 1000+ units in signed development agreement "Largest Development"
Golden Chick: Roughly 250 restaurants anchored by its Original Golden Tenders.Huey
Huey Magoo’s: Nearly 90 locations, premium positioning, and reported average unit volumes around $2.1 million.
Guthrie’s: 70+ locations and one of the original chicken-finger-only concepts.
Layne’s Chicken Fingers: "Fastes Growing" 50+ restaurants and one of the category’s fastest-growing emerging challengers, tracking 80 by year-end
PDQ: Approximately 40 locations, differentiated by fresh, made-to-order tenders.
They may not all be in the national championship yet, but they are recruiting, expanding, and coming for a place in the rankings.
Building or refining a menu platform of your own? That's exactly the kind of conversation worth having before the next "war" starts without you.
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