Chicken is just a sauce delivery system
The alt-protein movement should go harder on making a hit sauce
I recently read a Reddit thread about an NBA player who was doing a publicity stunt by working at a Raising Cane’s fast food restaurant. If you’ve never heard of it, Raising Cane’s is known for chicken fingers and there are 750+ locations in the US.
The discussion in the Reddit thread quickly turned to whether the food at Raising Cane’s is good or not. Some people love it, some hate it, but the overall sentiment was that no one actually goes there for the chicken. They go for the sauce, which is apparently like something devised by God himself.
There’s something insane about this situation. If the people want something breaded and chewy dipped in sauce, there’s got to be a way to provide that without torturing a gazillion chickens in the process. I know the mouthfeel and taste of plant-based chicken is not like the real thing. But does the consumer of Raising Cane’s chicken care? Their own fans describe the chicken as “very average”, yet they eat enough of it to make Cane’s one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the entire country.
Maybe alt-protein companies should be spending more of their R&D budget on making an undeniably amazing sauce, which they could then package and sell with their mediocre plant based meat. The sauce would be such a hit that they’d boost sales and win converts away from animal based products because no one cares about the meat anyway.
I’ve read endlessly about the organizations that are working to perfectly replicate meat. I commend them and hope they succeed. I’ve just not heard much about anyone trying to complement their offerings with a sauce so good that Redditors will be like, “yeah the protein is straight doo-doo, but the sauce is better than sex so what am I supposed to do, not eat it??”
I feel like the run at Panda Express, where they offered a Beyond Meat Orange Chicken meal, shows this sauce idea has potential. The dish gained a big following and thousands of consumers signed a petition to make it a permanent menu item (sadly, they failed). It even garnered this glowing headline in Business Insider, from a non-vegan writer: I tried Panda Express' new Beyond Meat orange chicken. It was delicious and now I'm sold on plant-based chicken.
People liked that dish because of the iconic Panda Express orange chicken sauce. Beyond Meat’s chicken substitute was not making waves on its own. But paired with a beloved sauce, it gained huge momentum.
I have never met someone who was excited about the taste of chicken. Especially in fast food form, it’s meant to be mild and forgettable. I feel like there is a way the animal movement can exploit the fact that fast food chicken sucks and people only eat it because it’s the convenient way to get the sauce they crave.
I of course wish we could convince restaurants to replace chicken fingers and nuggets with plant based alternatives because it’s just a fried, chewy, tasty, unhealthy glob either way. So why not use the one that is more humane? Especially when plant-based nuggets sometimes beat chicken nuggets in blind taste tests!
This top voted comment in a Reddit thread about that recent plant-based victory in a nuggets taste battle sums things up nicely:
Amen. Realistically though, people are resistant to change and plant-based stuff is still expensive. So there is not likely to be a mass takeover from veggie nuggets anytime soon. At least, not on their own. That’s why we need to somehow conquer the sauce! And then hell, I dunno, market the hell out of it and start a vegan fast food chain? Am I totally delusional?
I’m not saying it would be easy. Maybe there is not much room left to innovate in the sauce market. But those folks at Raising Cane’s did it, and now they sell 5 million chicken fingers per day. Chicken fingers that are mediocre at best.
I think addicting consumers to a sauce in order to carve out some market share for the good guys is a moonshot project worth funding.
This is a brilliant idea. There’s a fast food chain in Melbourne that kind of does this, called Lord of the Fries. When it first opened 15+ years ago, it was a huge hit and all of my friends went to eat there. I refused to join because I assumed it’d have nothing vegan. It took me years to realise that everything is vegetarian or vegan. There were so many branches by that point. The thing they were famous for was all their sauces for their fries… but people would often get their nuggets or even burgers without realising it’s not meat. To this day, I bet many Melburnians don’t realise Lord of the Fries is meat free. I do wish they emphasised their nuggets + sauce as much as the fries. I think they’d be very popular, since you’re right, most people are just there for the sauce.