Burger King's New Chicken Nugget Makeover Took A Page (Or Two) From McDonald's

Burger King has been on quite a tear lately, with its revamped Whopper taking the fast food world by storm. Now the chain is taking on a different challenge: chicken. It announced that based on customer feedback, it was time to rethink its chicken nuggets entirely. The new nuggets are made of 100% white meat and feature a a crisp breading, a marinade to add flavor, and new packaging. 

From the promotional photos, they do look suspiciously like McDonald's McNuggets; the image provided to press shows shapes that look like McNuggets' familiar forms (most notably, what McDonald's affectionately calls "the boot"). It's hard to tell for sure from the photo, but the new breading also looks more like the tempura-style one on McNuggets than the crumb coat on the old BK nuggets. 

McDonald's isn't the only chain being copied by this nugget relaunch; no respectable nugget comes without its own sauce, so there'll be new sauces on the way too, including a signature Savory Sauce with a creamy texture and notes of ketchup, barbecue seasoning, garlic, onion, and black pepper. This sounds a lot like a mix between Chick-fil-A's signature sauce and Raising Cane's. Other sauces include a reformulated honey mustard, a Buffalo, and a pineapple-forward sweet and sour. You can expect the new nuggets to drop on September 1.

Burger King's not afraid to take hints from successful items at other chains and tack dupes shamelessly onto the menu. It came out with a Big Mac dupe, complete with two beef patties, cheese, onions, lettuce, pickles, and of course, a special sauce, in the late '90s, which has since been discontinued. The current menu features the Bacon King, which is a can't-be-a-coincidence combination of two beef patties, bacon, cheese, ketchup, and mayo — basically a one-to-one copy of Wendy's Baconator.

But the phrase, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," is apt here. If these things are what customers love, then it's not a terrible idea to at least scoop up a bit of business that way. The new chicken nuggets being a lot like McDonald's iconic ones makes sense, since Burger King's current nuggets are sort of spongy and lifeless (but hey, at least they're cheap). The new Whopper is really motivating people to come back to BK (earlier this year on a call the company said it'd gotten an 8.5% increase in Whopper sales thanks to the new sandwich alone), so the new nuggets are sure to keep the other fast food companies on their toes.