23% Say This Restaurant Has The Worst Fried Chicken

The chicken sandwich wars have been raging among fast food companies since summer 2019, when Popeyes released its new version and ignited a Twitter feud with Chick-fil-A about who makes the best chicken sandwich (via Restaurant Business). The highly-publicized battle got a lot of attention on social media, and Popeyes' chicken sandwich debuted to considerable fanfare, selling out of its initial supply within a month.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and other fast food chains, particularly chicken-centric ones, quickly saw an opportunity and began introducing their own chicken sandwiches in an attempt to capitalize on the craze. Each sandwich more or less followed the same basic formula of Chick-fil-A and Popeyes' success: crispy chicken stacked with pickles, and maybe a dab of mayo or some other tangy sauce applied to the bun.

Unsurprisingly, the two chains that started this skirmish placed second and third respectively on our list ranking fast food fried chicken sandwiches. What might shock you, however, is what fast food chicken giant our survey respondents recently voted as having the worst fried chicken.

Mashed recently surveyed a group of 552 people in the U.S. about which restaurant has the worst fried chicken. When asked to pick from Bojangles, Church's, Jollibee, KFC, Popeyes, Raising Cane's, and Zaxby's, the one that the majority of people placed at the bottom of the fried chicken bucket was none other than the 11 original herbs and spices of the restaurant formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Yes, you read that right. The first fast food chicken chain in the world, founded by a man who set the standard for cooking fried chicken fast and crispy, received 23.55% of votes in the "worst fried chicken" poll. Church's, which has been around since 1952, ranked next to last — 16.30% of voters chose it as the worst fried chicken.

Zaxby's and Popeyes logged identical numbers (12.68%), while Jollibee was slightly ahead of these two competitors at 12.50%. Bojangles (11.23%) and Raising Cane's (11.05%) came out as winners, in the sense that the lowest number of respondents selected them as the worst fried chicken. Raising Cane's opened its first store in 1996, proving that you don't have to be old and established like KFC and Church's to win the battle for fried chicken supremacy.