Golden Chick
Menu Strategy
Maximum flavor, minimum lift. Cluck, that’s good.
Golden Chick has been a Dallas favorite chicken tender chain for decades. But, as the brand set its sights on regional growth, it needed a menu strategy that could travel. Golden Chick approached The Culinary Edge to develop a limited time offer strategy that would win over new consumers without disrupting its dialed operations.
The Opportunity.
Classic chicken, fearless flavors.
Tasked with attracting a new generation of bold, adventurous consumers, TCE knew Golden Chick needed ultra-craveable flavors to shout from the rooftops. Ones that were compelling and unique within an already saturated market. We tapped into the brand’s Texas-Southern DNA to identify flavor systems that felt authentic to our roots, but still on-trend – all while fitting seamlessly into a compact, high-efficiency kitchen model. Ingredients like spicy pimento, jalapeno ranch, and Texas street corn brought Golden Chick’s brand to life with a Texas twist on winning marketplace flavors.
From strategy to sandwich.
With limited real estate and tight operational constraints, Golden Chick couldn’t rely on scale alone to compete. We saw opportunity in handhelds—specifically sandwiches—as a yet untapped whitespace for Golden Chick to break through with a new consumer. Portable, affordable, and endlessly versatile, sandwiches became the perfect platform for delivering bold, differentiated flavor in a simple-to-execute format.
Rather than overhaul the kitchen, we worked within existing systems—leveraging current builds, streamlining prep, and introducing just a few high-impact SKUs to keep labor and supply chains tight.
Winner, winner!
The first product to launch from this strategy: the Pimento Crunchwich. Built on the foundations of Golden Chick’s core capabilities and flavored to stand out with an emerging flavor profile, the sandwich debuted with indicators of early success; to date, it has provided a 50% lift in sandwich category sales.
