Chicken sandwiches are scorching-hot right now as far as the food world goes. A veritable chicken throwdown is currently taking place in New York City, what with David Chang’s Fuku, Shake Shack’s ChickenShack sandwich, and a number of other restaurants turning away from burgers in favor of the original white meat—the city even got its first Chick-Fil-A recently.
But the chicken sandwich mania is bicoastal, and the new West Coast chicken joint The Organic Coup has a shiny USDA organic certification, the first for a fast food restaurant, to set it apart.
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The first organic fast food restaurant is an unlikely one in that it is almost solely focused on fried chicken—not exactly the first thing to come to mind when thinking “organic.” (Less surprisingly, it is located near San Francisco.) Its menu features a fried chicken sandwich, a fried chicken wrap, a fried chicken bowl, a side of popcorn, and drinks. That’s it. You pay a bit of a premium for the organic label, with each main menu item clocking in at $8.99, or the equivalent of nearly nine (!!) Dollar Menu McChickens.
Getting a restaurant certified as organic is no easy task. You can’t just throw a bunch of organic ingredients onto a menu and hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Ingredients need to be tracked down to the individual lot and logged, preparation areas need to be managed so that organic ingredients at no point come into contact with non-organic ingredients, and even things like cleaning products and pesticides need to meet certain requirements. It’s an endeavor, and there are only around a dozen organic certified restaurants nationwide. Organic Coup, which can better certify its organic worthiness with a streamlined menu, plans to open 25 more locations in the next 14 months, which would more than triple the current amount of certified organic restaurants out there.
Organic Coup was started by a former buyer for Costco, a big player in organic food, and it’s taking a trend of going organic one step further than its competitors. Chains like LYFE Kitchen, Shake Shack, and many others have doubled down on Chipotle’s GMO-free ethos, which also happens to be very advertising-friendly.
But it isn’t just new chains that are getting in on the trend. McDonald’s, for example, recently announced it would be using only antibiotic-free chicken meat in its stores, and is experimenting with an organic burger in Germany and Austria. And, as the New Yorker notes, when McDonald’s leads, others follow. McDonald’s switch to antibiotic-free chicken ruffled feathers in the industry, and within days Costco made a similar announcement, followed by Tyson Foods, the biggest chicken processer in the United States. For its part, Taco Bell recently announced it would switch to using only cage-free eggs.
Organic Coup seems ideally situated to hop on two rising trends: fried chicken sandwiches, and the push for clean eating. Organic fried chicken is nice and all, but the real coup will be to keep those organic standards up as the soon-to-be-chain expands.
