Burger King's 'New and Improved' Nuggets Arrive Day One; the Nation Is, Per the Nation, 'In a Moment'

MILLBURN, N.J. — Burger King’s “new and improved” chicken nuggets hit restaurants nationwide today, made with 100 percent white chicken meat, a new marinade, and a “perfected crunch,” per the chain’s rollout, and the country responded the way the country responds to any national food event: by lining up, filming it, and having opinions that did not, for the first several hours, agree with each other. The nugget, which has been a thing since before most of the current customer base was born, has never been “new and improved.” It is now. The burger, by contrast, is not. The nugget is the star. The nugget has always been the star. The chain just took nine months and a “multiyear plan” to say it.

The change itself is, per the marketing, the result of consumer feedback, which is the industry’s name for “people complained and we finally looked.” The old nugget, to its many defenders, was a nugget: breaded, mysterious, served in a box, dipped in a sauce that was also, in a previous era, mysterious. The new nugget is white meat, which is a category of chicken that used to be called “tender” and is now being called “100 percent,” which is the way the food industry raises a chicken to the level of a legal standard.

The tasting public has divided, as tasting publics do, into the camp that is “not bad, honestly” and the camp that is “it’s fine,” and both camps are using the same words to mean different things, which is the most American sentence structure ever constructed. A nugget, in this telling, is either an improvement or a replacement, and the difference between the two is a marinade, and the difference between the marinade and the complaint is a person’s memory of a 2019 nugget that may or may not have been this good. Memory, in fast food, is a seasoning.

What the “improvement” actually is, per the people who have had both, is a question with a regional answer. In the South, the verdict leans “finally.” In the Midwest, the verdict leans “it’s a nugget.” On the East Coast, the verdict leans toward a photo being taken of the tray, and the photo, per every account, is the real product. The dipping sauces, which were also revamped and are now “updated,” arrived in new packaging, which is the food industry’s way of telling you that something happened when the thing that happened is a cup.

The company’s multiyear plan to improve its food and sales, of which the nugget is the latest chapter, is the part the coverage keeps calling “bold,” which is the word the food industry uses for “we did the thing people asked for and then we had to announce that we did the thing people asked for.” The nugget was the ask. The nugget, for a decade or more, was the ask. The plan, in retrospect, is a to-do list with a press release at the bottom.

At press time, a Burger King spokesperson said customers could find the new nuggets “in restaurants nationwide,” and, when asked what the “perfected crunch” was, said it was the result of “listening to our customers.” The listening, per the spokesperson, had been ongoing for several years. The crunch, per the spokesperson, had been perfect all along. The two statements, in the spokesperson’s delivery, were the same statement, which is the way a lot of fast food ends up: not wrong, exactly, but improved.