Bone-in fried chicken is as old as the Thirteen Colonies and, for 200 years, this traditional fried chicken went largely unchanged. But a few key technologic advances in the 20th century altered American fried chicken forever, according to a recent article written by Craig Cavallo at Serious Eats. Bill Roenigk, NCC’s former senior vice president and chief economist, now retired, is quoted extensively in the article.
The article discusses the history of mechanization of poultry processing, per capita consumption of chicken, and trends toward boneless, skinless, cut-up, and prepared products and how these factors forever changed the chicken industry.
Roenigk is quoted in the article as saying the post World War II boom played a key role in reshaping the modern poultry industry. “If you go back to before World War II,” he said, “the slaughter, and what they call the evisceration was pretty much done by hand. The birds were hung upside down and people moved to the bird,” Roenigk said. After World Ward II, he said, “the people became stationary and the birds moved.” Slaughter facilities came to resemble automobile assembly lines.
“If we go way back into the ’60s, and even into the early ’70s, pretty much everybody thought about a whole carcass chicken,” Roenigk said. “You either bought a 29 cents per pound chicken or you did not.” He pointed out that USDA started reported the price for boneless, skinless breast meat for the first time in 1971, signaling that it was big enough on the market that it have its own pricing.
McDonald’s introduced the Chicken McNugget in 1979, which became available nationwide in 1983. The McNugget revolutionized fast food and forever changed the poultry industry. Burger King added Chicken Tenders to its menu two years later. KFC Popcorn chicken followed as well as a host of other boneless products, including the traditional chicken wing, with skin on and bone in, then the boneless wing.
“The industry not only became more productive in terms of producing a live bird,” Reonigk said, “but also it became much more productive and efficient at producing all these various parts and prepared products that we see in the market now.”
To read the complete article, click here.
