The real reason Chik-fil-a wins

So I saw this chart, uh, the other day, and it absolutely is mind-blowing. Basically, somebody went through— I'll put up on the screen here— somebody went through and broke down each type of fast food restaurant and did the amount of sales that they do by store. And if you look here, number 1 is Chick-fil-A, number 2 is Raising Cane's, number 3— I don't even remember who it is— but if you look through this list, something's really interesting. Number 1 and number 2 are chicken-only restaurants. Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's. It's just like an interesting thing. Everybody else is serving beef or sandwiches or pizza or whatever. But the restaurants that are doing the absolute most revenue per location are two that just serve chicken. It's fascinating. Well, I think I know exactly why it is. And it all comes down to genetics and breeding and mutants. And so this video is going to talk about that. And we'll dig in. So if you're new here, my name is Michael Girdley. I'm actually on vacation. I'm a business nerd. I love talking about business. And I love sharing sharing what I learn about business, and I do it through YouTube videos and that sort of thing. And if you're an entrepreneur and you want to learn how to do better at business and follow along, please subscribe. Would love to have you here. So done a lot of stuff, but man, like other people have real hobbies. I like to talk about business, which, well, it's fun. So anyway, please subscribe. It'll make me happy and also make my wife feel good that I'm doing this while I'm on vacation. So, okay, so it gets even crazier. So the data that I showed you in the very first video, or in the first part of this video, about Chick-fil-A, it's actually a bit dated. Sales per store at Chick-fil-A keeps going through the roof. And I'll put up this next thing, which is a meme from my friend, The Franchise Wolf, who's a Twitter creator. But basically this video here, or this image here, shows what Chick-fil-A's revenue per store is doing and has been doing each particular year. And this year in 2024, they have a good chance of breaking $10 million in sales per store. Just absolutely crazy. That's almost double what they were doing just 6 years ago in 2018. And if you compare that to some of these other chains, like number 3 is Shake Shack, like selling burgers for $3.8 million. Like the average Chick-fil-A is doing almost 3 times the revenue of a Shake Shack. Just incredible numbers. And look, Chick-fil-A is everywhere. It's in every, like, every corner around me and there's cars everywhere. But the number 2 chain is Raising Cane's. They've been growing crazy. As well. Uh, like, they're not a small chain either. They've— they're in every single state. And I think the reason I see them as being so popular— I look at this chart here of Raising Cane's, I'll put up on screen— there's 194 of them in Texas. So like, pretty crazy. These are not little chains, uh, between Chick-fil-A and, uh, and Raising Cane's. So, so like, what gives? Like, it's interesting that the number 1 and number 2 just only sell chicken. Well, Why? Like, why does— what's the pattern going on here? Oh, and by the way, like, whatever is causing these two chains, Chick-fil-A and Cane's, to be winning so much, they've been growing really fast. They keep winning. And if— here I pulled up this chart, I'll put it on the screen. Of the top 5 fastest growing restaurant chains, 3 are chicken only. Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane's, and Wingstop. Totally fascinating. And the answer— I know people love to talk about why Chick-fil-A has amazing customer service or the franchise model or any of that kind of stuff, or Raising Cane's has terrific sauces. Yeah, okay, fantastic. Those are all nice to have, but they can be easily copied. But here is what I think is the absolute answer to this whole thing, which is I'll put up this picture right now. And what you see here on the screen is what a chicken looked like in 1957, what a typical chicken looked like in 1978, and then what a chicken looked like in 2005. And what do you notice? Like chickens have basically mutated. Like we've bred them, we've changed them in a crazy way kind of over the past 50 years to where a chicken when it's fully grown now is absolutely massive compared to where it was 50 years ago. It's 4 times bigger. And frankly, you look at some of the statistics on chickens, go watch some of the videos, it'll blow your mind. Most chickens have such big breasts now, like they're so big that they are unable to actually reproduce. So they have to be artificially inseminated. Like just crazy amount of human manipulation has turned the chicken into basically this crazy, food mutant. Check out this chart, check out this chart here. And while we've like changed how big a chicken gets, we've changed how quickly a chicken will turn into this giant mutant chicken that's ready to be eaten. Um, you look here at like a— what a chicken looked like in 1957, 1978, 2005, the types of chickens that we were growing at those times, and then how quickly those chickens got big. Like, it's unbelievable that a chicken can go from a 44-gram chick when it's born to basically 4,202 grams. So like 2 pounds, uh, 2.2 pounds basically, whatever that is. Like, no, that's an 8-pound chicken. 4,202 grams. It can go that quick in less than 2 months. I mean, imagine if humans grew that quickly. We'd all be the size of King Kong by our 6th birthday. Just absolutely crazy. And look, uh, a life of a chicken is not that pleasant. I'll put up— I'll pull up a video of what it looks like when, you know, the factory farming of chickens happens. It's pretty insane. And I'm not saying there's anything about that, but that, you know, if you want cheap food and you want calories that come to us for a low dollar amount, well, like, that's kind of the cost of it. Like, the animals unfortunately pay the price. Maybe this is turning into a video about why you should be a vegan, frankly. And so what's crazy about this also is chickens have gotten incredibly efficient at turning like a calorie of feed, like, so grain or whatever goes into growing that chicken and turning that into a calorie of protein. And so here, I'll pull up this graph here from our World in Data. And basically, the animal that by far is the most productive in terms of dollar of input to output of a calorie of protein is the chicken, right? So you look at the chicken here has— they call it poultry— is a 19.6 efficiency. So 1 out of every 5 calories it's fed turns into protein. The number 2 is not even half as efficient, and that are pigs. That's 8.5%. And getting crushed is beef, 3.8%. So in other words, a chicken is— whatever the math is there— 5 times more efficient at turning a dollar of feed into a dollar, or into a calorie, or calories of, of protein. Just an unbelievable efficiency by the chicken. So what all this has done is like basically put the evolution of chicken, has put it in this incredibly dominant position to basically overtake and outcompete all the other meats and all the other protein sources. So if you want to get protein at a fast food restaurant, the dollars you're going to spend to get a calorie of chicken protein is going to vastly outweigh, be less than what you're going to spend to get beef, chicken, pork, or even fish. Fish is not even on this graphic that I'm going to put up here. And you can see this in the results of basically how much we're eating of each individual of these items year after year. And beef, pork, turkey, like they're absolutely getting crushed by the humble chicken. And that's because think about it, like if you're operating a restaurant and you're only doing chicken, like people can't buy beef, they can't buy turkey, they can't buy fish, can't buy any of that other stuff, which is what Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's do by specializing in those things. Uh, they're able to just create a total competitive advantage because they can optimize their supply chain. They can go all in on making chicken great. And then frankly, they don't give customers the option to buy anything that is less profitable for them. It's just totally fascinating. So here, this chart shows what's happened to the relative price of chicken compared to similar proteins. So take a look at their beef, right? Beef has fluctuated way up since 2000. The dollars, the number of cents required to produce that particular protein of beef, like, keeps going up. Uh, chicken, uh, is blue in this graph, and then you have pork in yellow. And look what's happened to all the other protein sources that McDonald's and Burger King and all these other people are relying upon. Like, those prices keep going up and up, right? That is a huge advantage if you're Chick-fil-A or Raising Cane's, because the humble chicken, right, it keeps staying super cheap for you. And you can keep prices down and therefore keep customers in the door. And look, uh, I am not going to sit here and tell you that Chick-fil-A is awesome. It tastes good, but one of the things you should do if you eat there, I humbly encourage you to go in and actually read the ingredients. I just pulled this up, I'll put it on the screen. How many of those things that you see there on the screen actually look like food? Very little of them. It says chicken, but then there's a bunch of other crap they put in there. Like, what the hell is glutamate, uh, all this paprika, I recognize that, but, uh, monocalcium phosphate, I don't want to eat that. I would like to eat some chicken, please. So that's my, uh, that's my commercial about Chick-fil-A. So anyway, that is at its core, if you want to look at why these chicken-only restaurants are killing it, um, like it's absolutely amazing. So, um, it's because of this humble chicken. Now one of the things that's super interesting I want to go back to is the protein efficiency of other sources. And one of those is milk. And if you notice, one of the other things that we've seen growing a lot in these fast food chains, whether it's Domino's or some of the other type ones, is stuff based on cheese. And where does cheese come from? Milk. So it's super interesting that the number 2 most efficient protein is milk. And, uh, also the types of chains that are growing really quickly are pizza places that use a lot of cheese. Based on milk. Again, they have a huge cost efficiency, uh, just like the chicken guys do. Similar parallel. Fast forward to the day in 2024, um, I do want to point something out. The advantage of the chicken is not sticking as long as it used to, and there's a lot of problems with chicken happening. We're seeing one here in 2025 where there's a huge culling of herds because of a lot of the flus and stuff that are going through chickens. So there's a huge egg shortage and all that kind of stuff. People getting busted bringing in eggs from Mexico, like smuggling them in. Kind of crazy. So you are starting to see inflation in eggs and chicken. And it'll be interesting to see how that affects these different chains as they go forward. So I'll put up this chart here. You can see from '21, 2021 to 2022, eggs, chicken, and milk, like they had more inflation than some of the other sources of protein. So it'll be interesting to watch this and, you know, ultimately see if the chicken itself continues to have its dominance as the cheapest and most efficient source of protein per dollar in the US and beyond. Because ultimately, like, the whole answer here is that Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's, they're built on the chicken. And man, it was a hell of a bet to make. It's made billionaires. Kudos to them. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks for being here.