Chick-Fil-A Adding Plant-Based Sandwich Option To Its Menu
Chick-Fil-A is launching its plant-based cauliflower "chicken" sandwich, starting in three markets - Denver, Colorado, Charleston, South Carolina, and Greensboro-Triad, North Carolina.
Healthy food options have been a hot-button topic for quite a while now, and restaurant chains have been adding healthier options to their menus. This is to ensure that its menu is diverse and enticing to all consumers to increase the location visit rate of those customers. And Chick-fil-A is ready to roll out its first plant-based entrée, drum roll please, a cauliflower sandwich.
In a statement released by Chick-fil-A’s Culinary Lead, Stuart Tracy which was reported by CNBC, “We explored every corner of the plant-based space in search of the perfect centerpiece for our plant-forward entrée,” When he says they explored every corner, he is not kidding. The development of this entrée took four years to come to fruition, they began working on it around the time when chains like Dunkin Donuts and Burger King were adding Beyond Meat and Impossible plant-based options in their locations.
Tracy further added, “Time and time again, we kept returning to cauliflower as the base of our sandwich.” What Chick-fil-A discovered while going through this development process was that it is difficult to find the proper plant that has many of the characteristics and most importantly the natural flavor that closely imitates the taste of the meat they are substituting for. This is no easy task, and some food chains’ biggest mistake is pushing out a product that doesn’t meet the consumer’s expectations for the quality of that product.
Many can likely recall their first veggie burger experience when those products first became a revolutionary release. In my personal experience, when I took my first bite, I was extremely disappointed with the original product. This was because I expected it to resemble the taste of a juicy burger. Instead, I was met with a completely different taste profile, and I can only describe it as what I could imagine grilled cardboard would taste like.
This was one of the early pioneers in this brand-new market space, and like any company, they took in feedback and adjusted the product’s recipe. The veggie burgers you can get today from a multitude of restaurants and manufacturers are a much better representation of an actual beef hamburger than the first-to-the-market product was. However, what that first product did do was establish that there is a healthy food consumer market out there just waiting to be tapped into with a great quality plant-based meat substitute.
Chick-fil-A has a long-lasting and stellar reputation regarding the quality of its chicken sandwiches. They are considered by many to be the leaders in that space, and they needed to be 100% sure that when they start testing their version of a plant-based sandwich, it could live up to the quality standard that is synonymous with its brand. Cauliflower’s history is that many decades ago it was a common dinner-time staple as the vegetable side for your entrée, but over time it grew less appealing to the general public.
About 10 years ago it began its resurgence and was being used more and more frequently as a substitute option on many different culinary dishes. If you love your cauliflower or you are a Chick-fil-A fanatic and want to get a taste of their test item right away, they are going to begin testing them beginning Monday, February 13th in the following areas Denver, Colorado, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Greensboro-Triad region in North Carolina. If you are not local to those stores, you will have to hope they test well and we get the full nationwide rollout in the near future.
