Why Economists Love Chicken Tenders

Chicken tender history is a classic demand tale.

Chicken Tender History

The butchers among us call the little-used muscle near the breastbone (that neither flaps nor walks) the tenderloin. Because it gets minimal exercise, the tender is, yes, tender. It also is tasteless.

Our story starts in a Manchester, New Hampshire restaurant that had been started by two Greek immigrants in 1917. Still around in 1974 and run by the same family, the restaurant invented the chicken tender after its chef “had a small piece of chicken he didn’t know what to do with.” After cutting up a chicken, he wound up with a dangling piece of meat that had no purpose.

In a supermarket case, neatly wrapped, many of us have seen chicken tenders like these:

So, behaving like a true entrepreneur, Charlie Pappas (a son of one of the restaurant’s founders) devised a recipe. Creating demand that previously had not existed, the recipe first called for soaking the chicken in a pineapple-juice marinade. Next came the breading and the frying, and then the duck sauce for dunking. Word spread and eventually the tenders became the most popular menu item.

The tipping point came though when Burger King, competing against the McNugget, added chicken tenders to its menu. Still though, it was not until 1999 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture added chicken tenders to its stats. Because chicken tenders were one of the cheapest pieces of the bird, restaurants loved them…but not for long. Today it is the most expensive cut.

After Burger King’s first tenders were so popular that they ran out of chicken, they had to pull the ads:

Fast forwarding, we all know what happened. Now we can buy chicken tenders at Chick-fil-A, Popeye’s and a slew of “chicken-centric” establishments and your pizza place and seafood shack. Slate Money tells us (and we know) that kids love to order them.

Having not existed 50 years ago, now chicken tenders are everywhere.

Our Bottom Line: Demand

Discussing demand with my class, we focus at first on three demand concepts. We look at demand, then quantity demanded, and finally changes in demand. The definition of demand is just what we are willing and able to buy at a list of different prices. As a result, shown on a schedule, demand for an item is not just one price/quantity pair. It is many. Then, building from there, quantity demanded is a specific amount that we are willing and able to buy at one price. And finally, changes in demand relate to the determinants of demand that alter our whole demand schedule. Those changes include income, substitutes, complements, the number of buyers, and usefulness (utility). When a determinant changes, so too will our demand.

You can see that the history of chicken tenders was about demand, the quantity demanded, and the changes in demand. It is an economist’s dream example.

My sources and more: Thanks to Slate Money for alerting me to the Pete Wells article on the Chicken tender.