MenuMasters 2011: PopeyesMenuMasters 2011: Popeyes

When you sell 900,000 pounds of chicken in one month, chances are pretty good that you came up with a product that the market was looking for.

Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen scored a big win with its summer 2010 LTO, Wicked Chicken. The Atlanta-based chain sold that 900,000 pounds of the spicy chicken in June of 2010. The chicken was bundled in a box with fries, ranch dip and Tabasco sauce and sold for $3.99 an order.

This was the first global rollout of a limited-time offer for Popeyes’ 1,977 restaurants, which are located throughout 26 countries.

Popeyes chief marketing officer Dick Lynch said innovation is at the heart of the quick-service marketplace.

“It has to meet real consumer needs to drive traffic. It has got to be relevant and it has got to build brand differentiation,” he said. “This is a great case where Wicked Chicken did all of those things.”

Lynch said Popeyes was looking for a boneless product that would make some noise in the quick-service realm.

Wicked Chicken
Company: Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen
Parent company: AFC Enterprises Inc.
Headquarters: Atlanta
Number of units: 1,977
Description of item: thin strips of white-meat chicken marinated with Louisiana seasonings and cooked to a crispy coating
Date of rollout: June 2010
Price: $3.99 with Cajun fries, biscuit, ranch dipping sauce and mini bottle of Tabasco
Developer: Amy Alarcon, director of culinary innovation

“The directive to [Popeyes director of culinary innovation] Amy [Alarcon] and her group was ‘boneless portable,’” Lynch said. “At a perceived value price point, because that is where the chicken category is going.”

The genesis of Wicked Chicken stretches back to January 2009. Alarcon was visiting a poultry supplier, watching them cut nuggets, when she asked if the chicken could be cut into thinner, longer strips.

“I saw something and it sparked an idea,” Alarcon said. “If you are cutting it that way, why couldn’t you cut it differently from the ‘same old, same old,’ because everyone has strips and tenders and nuggets on the menu.

“When we started playing with it and getting the shape right, it seemed to be a lot more youthful and fun than a lot of the boneless products you see out there,” she said.

Building flavor, especially the distinct Louisiana regional flavor, was a high priority once the chicken was cut to the right specification, Alarcon said.

“Everything we do here is through the lens of Louisiana,” Lynch said. “There are two parts to what makes something Louisiana. There is the festival, Mardi Gras part of it, and then there is the robust, bold flavor part of it.”

Once the culinary team establishes what Alarcon calls the “gold standard” recipe, it goes through two levels of customer panel testing and tasting before it goes into an actual market test. Then the company studies how it fits in at the unit level.

“We just want to see how it fits in with the flow of operations,” Alarcon said. “No matter how great it is in the test kitchen, if it can’t work into the restaurants’ operations system, then it is a ‘no go.’

“We really wanted to make sure we could do this in our current operating stance. We are set up to hand batter and bread chicken all day long,” Alarcon said. “We wanted to use the same process. We wanted the chicken to come in already cut and marinated.”

Menu consultant and president of The Kruse Company Nancy Kruse said that Popeyes is at the forefront of bold, full-flavored foods in the quick-service arena.

“While spicy foods have grown dramatically on chain menus over the past decade, I feel that very little credit has been given to Popeyes as one of the prime movers behind the trend,” Kruse said. “They turned the whole notion of bland, middle-of-the-road, lowest-
common-taste denominator on its head and opened the door for chains at all levels, but especially quick service, to ratchet up the flavor quotient. They’re true flavor pioneers, in my view.”

Alarcon agreed, saying spicy offerings are part of Popeyes’ public profile. But the team sets out to make food that has bold flavor native to the Louisiana region rather than trying to ratchet up the heat.

“There is a misconception that if you say it is Cajun or Creole that it has to be hot,” Alarcon said. “We don’t really abide by that. We think it means you have to have a lot of spices, a lot of flavor. But we want it to have a broad appeal. That is why we wanted to add in the Tabasco bottle, so you could have a bit of customization.”

The mini bottles of Tabasco had to be hand-filled at the hot-sauce maker’s factories. So for operations to be smooth during the rollout, Tabasco needed to get going on production in January of 2010, four months before the offer was slated to run systemwide in June.

“Our association with Tabasco was no accident.” Lynch said. “They are obviously in our flavor zone. And it is not just about heat. They have a significant amount of vinegar in their recipe that gives it more of a complex flavor.”

Lynch said Popeyes tested Wicked Chicken both with and without the mini-bottle of hot sauce, and it tested “much more strongly” with the bottle.

“Consumers just like it,” he said. “It is very fun.”

Contact Mike Dempsey at [email protected].