Everything You Need To Know About The Popeyes Fried Chicken Challenge

Imagine you're a Popeyes worker, a job that mostly consists of serving people fried chicken or cleaning the dining room. It's an otherwise slow, but pretty average day for you and your co-workers — that is, until a single customer walks in. His order isn't anything out of the ordinary — a 16-piece meal. You give him his order and expect to see him head back out the doors to his waiting family. Instead, the man sits down at a booth out of the way, and with all the ferocity of a wild animal on its prey, begins to dig into his chicken. He tears through the fried poultry as if he were a man possessed, ripping his way through drumsticks and thighs in only a matter of minutes. 

While we all like the occasional burger or fried chicken, there are some people who take that desire for a fast, cheap meal to a much higher level. Take for example, competitive eater Matt Stonie. Stonie, a 29-year old from San Jose, California, already has several impressive achievements under his belt. His most notable achievement is ending fellow competitive eater Joey Chestnut's eight-year winning streak at Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest back in 2015, per CNN.

Of course, Stone has plenty of other achievements that, depending on how you view competitive eating, may amaze or disgust you. In 2017, Stonie conquered the Popeyes challenge, putting away everything from chicken to biscuits in one sitting. 

Now, eating an entire 16-piece box of chicken in one go would be a tough job for most people, no matter how many Cajun spices it's made with. For Matt Stonie, that wasn't an issue whatsoever. According to MediaFeed, Stonie ordered a 16-piece family meal, which consisted not only of the titular 16 pieces of chicken, but also eight biscuits and three large sides. That's over 8,000 calories right there, especially considering his choice of sides were mac and cheese, red beans and rice, and coleslaw.

In a YouTube video documenting his endeavor back in 2017, Stonie takes only 25 minutes to tear his way through the box of chicken, ripping apart breasts and thighs, or even breaking chicken bones in half to eat the pieces faster. Throughout the feast, Stonie jokes and chats to the camera in between bites of biscuits and coleslaw, treating the whole affair as if it were an average Sunday dinner. 

This isn't the first time Stonie has performed such a stunt on camera. True to his competitive eater nature, Stone has also consumed 13 pounds of milk and cookies in under half an hour, and later putting away four 4x4 In-N-Out burgers in less than four minutes, per BroBible. Whether you're impressed or a bit sick from thinking of eating all that food, one thing is for a certain: Matt Stonie is a man who enjoys a good meal, just like any of us.