With demand for plant-based meat booming, Beyond Meat earlier today ran a test run of its plant-based fried chicken substitute at a single KFC restaurant in Atlanta. The verdict? Demand for plant-based chicken is immense, with the KFC location selling completely out of its supply in less than five hours.
According to a PR rep for the company, lines at the KFC store began forming at 8 in the morning and didn’t let up until the supply was exhausted. Speaking to the demand for the chicken substitute, KFC relayed that the amount of Beyond Chicken consumers purchased today is the equivalent to the amount of popcorn chicken the store sells over the course of an entire week.
As to where KFC and Beyond Meat go from here, a company spokesperson indicated that KFC will take a good and hard look at today’s trial run, along with customer feedback, and will ultimately decide if it wants to engage in a larger test run or, perhaps, a nation-wide roll out.
“KFC Beyond Fried Chicken is so delicious, our customers will find it difficult to tell that it’s plant-based,” KFC president and chief concept officer said in a press release. “I think we’ve all heard ‘it tastes like chicken’ –well our customers are going to be amazed and say, ‘it tastes like Kentucky Fried Chicken!”
Going forward, it stands to reason that we’ll see more and more fast food chains strike deals with purveyors of plant-based meat alternatives. The biggest deal thus far saw Burger King partner up with Impossible Foods to launch the Impossible Whopper a few weeks ago.
