Few things in life are both cheaper and better, but for a long time, this was true of the chicken thigh. Its superiority was passed like a shibboleth among food connoisseurs: Thighs are juicier, tastier, are almost half the price—preferable in just about every way to the boneless, skinless, flavorless breasts that reign supreme in America.
Well, the secret’s out. On a recent trip to the grocery store, I picked up a pack of boneless thighs that cost, pound for pound, some 50 cents more than boneless breasts. In fact, the cost of thighs has crept steadily upward for years now, and surpassed that of breasts for much of last year. In recent months, breasts have gained in price again, but white meat’s continued dominance no longer seems assured. Home cooks have embraced the flavor and versatility of dark meat; fast-casual restaurants such as Chipotle and Sweetgreen have it all over their menus. After a decades-long run, America’s white-meat era may finally be ending.
That era began in 1980s, when the first plant dedicated to deboned breast meat opened in the United States. “Before that, deboned breast meat was very expensive and rare,” Paul Aho, a poultry-industry consultant, told me. Eating chicken used to mean getting whole chickens, skin and bones and all. But when processing plants started atomizing chicken into their parts, the popularity of boneless, skinless breasts exploded. Americans learned to love not only slabs of white meat but also nuggets, patties, and tenders—processed products made possible by the ubiquity of deboned breasts. In an era obsessed with low-fat, low-cholesterol diets, white meat was deemed the healthier option too. Demand for breasts drove the expansion of the entire American poultry industry, Aho said.
The billions of chickens being raised for breast meat of course also have billions of thighs, legs, wings, and organs, arguably by-products of breast production. U.S. producers learned to export minimally processed leg quarters—an entire thigh and leg with skin and bones—overseas, where consumers did not mind, or even preferred, dark meat. Russia was a major customer, then China, and then Mexico.
The boneless and skinless chicken thigh, however, did not exist as a widespread meat product in the United States until the 2000s. This is also partially a story of industrial innovation: Over time, the thigh-deboning process has become more automated, making boneless dark meat less labor-intensive to produce. The Baader 632 Thigh Filleting System, for example, boasts of processing 230 thighs a minute, by yanking the meat straight off the bone. Aho points out that automation tends to work better with thighs, which have only a single straight bone, than with breasts, which cling to multiple curved bones. Machines that debone breasts usually can’t get the muscle off as cleanly, leaving more meat behind.
With the rise of the boneless thigh, American chicken producers saw an opportunity to sell dark meat at home, at prices higher than intact thighs can get overseas. They started producing more deboned thighs. In 2019, the chicken producer Sanderson Farms told the Los Angeles Times that it would soon have thigh-deboning capacity at all seven of its plants for large birds, compared with just one or two a couple of years earlier.
If a fully intact thigh is unmistakably a thigh, the boneless, skinless version is more approachable for Americans raised on similarly processed breasts. Deboned thighs are just as easy to throw on a grill, put in a sandwich, shred, or chop into bite-size pieces for burritos. In fact, they’re easier to cook than breasts, because they’re less prone to drying out from being left in the pan for five minutes too long. Recipe developers optimizing for easy and quick can tout their “mass appeal.” “I certainly see a lot more praise of dark meat than there used to be,” J. Kenji López-Alt, the food writer and cookbook author, told me. (He personally prefers a perfectly cooked chicken breast, but said it’s hard to get right.)
Matt Busardo, who heads up North American poultry for the market-intelligence firm Expana, points to two other reasons for the popularity of thighs: the diversification of the American palate, thanks to the popularity of Asian and Latin American cuisines that prize dark meat, and the rise of fast-casual restaurants, which considered thighs a tastier, more forgiving, and until recently cheaper cut. Chicken breasts are still popular; their sales have been rising this whole time, too. But “thigh meat has kind of overshot that by leaps and bounds,” Busardo told me. Sales of chicken breast by volume are up 3.9 percent in the past three years, but sales of thighs are up 15.9 percent, according to the marketing-research firm Circana.
The historically single-minded focus on breeding chickens for white meat has, ironically, made it less appealing in some ways. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of shoppers put off by woody breast or spaghetti meat—muscle disorders that result from the breast growing too big too fast. Chicken breasts have nearly doubled in size since the 1950s, and these muscle irregularities became common enough to worry the industry about 20 years ago. Woody breast causes an unappetizing, almost crunchy texture; spaghetti meat comes out mushy and stringy. Tinkering with diets to slow growth or slaughtering birds at lower weights can mitigate woody breast, Casey Owens, a poultry scientist at the University of Arkansas, told me. But a small, slower-growing chicken is a less profitable chicken. Owens has also studied how to make woody breasts more palatable through extra processing. When ground up into patties, she said, the extra connective tissue found in woody breasts makes for a less dense, maybe even preferable, texture.
If the demand for dark meat continues to rise, chickens selected for their big breasts may no longer be economically optimal. Could the industry start breeding birds with bigger thighs? “I’ve actually brought that up to breeding companies, and 10 or 15 years ago, they would just scoff at the idea,” Aho said. “Now they say, ‘We might need a more balanced bird.’”
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