New Study Reveals New York Likes it Spicy in Ranking for Top Chicken Nuggets

It's the favorite meal of nearly every child in America and even some adults and that's not hyperbole. Today we're talking 'chicken' as in chicken nuggets. More specifically we need to know who, out of all of the options available, who has the best chicken nuggets in New York.

Chicken Nugget Statistics

Everyone has an opinion on chicken nuggets and everyone has their favorite places to get them from and that's evident because throughout America, people eat A LOT of chicken nuggets.

A new study from Betting.US was recently released which crunched and calculated all the numbers of chicken nuggets and how it breaks down across America. The study, which was also covered by the New York Post, states that the national average of nuggets per meal in America is 12.9 nuggets. Some states blew well passed that number though.

To compound off of that, with a quick Google search and little help from artificial intelligence, you can see that per year people in America consume around "2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets".

Nugget Survey

The data from the study was gathered through surveys collected from 2,103 Americans during the month of October 2024. The data was then broken down into how many nuggets people have per serving in each state, how often people in each state eat chicken nuggets and what each states pick for top nugget was, among many other statistics.

The data also showed that many of the most popular names in the nugget game occupied nearly all of the top spots in each state. Top names in this case means the fast food giants like McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, KFC, and Chick-fil-A. When all the data was tabulated, a tally was taken of which restaurants reigned supreme.

Most Popular Nuggets in New York

According to the data, there is one clear cut winner in the state of New York for who has the best chicken nuggets. In New York the fast food queen Wendy's came out on top as being the home to the states favorite nuggets. This win for Wendy's in New York is partly because of Wendy's spicy nuggets as New Yorker's look for the combo of heat and spice.

In total, Wendy's secured a score of 9, that is 9 states, that ranked Wendy's as having the best chicken nuggets. The state of Ohio also scored Wendy's number 1, which isn't necessarily surprising as Wendy's headquarters is located in Dublin, Ohio. Despite their score though, Wendy's did not claim the most states.

Chicken Nugget Breakdown

According to the rest of the data, one chain reigned supreme over the rest and in a way it's kind of fitting because this restaurant also happens to be the most popular overall in America.

Yeah we're talking about McDonald's. McDonald's took the top spot in the Great Chicken Nugget battle based on the collected data scoring a total of 19 states. Chick-fil-A came in second place with a total of 17 states, followed by Wendy's with 9. Rounding out the list you had Burger King with a score of 2 with KFC and Popeyes each getting 1 state a piece. No surprise, those states were Kentucky and Louisiana respectively.

Now if you added those numbers in your head while reading along, you probably realized that only counts for 49 out of America's 50 states. So that leaves 1 unaccounted for state. Well unaccounted until now because the state of North Carolina claimed a restaurant known as CookOut as their top spot for chicken nuggets.

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In the interest of total transparency, in reading through the numbers provided in the study, it appears that an error was made when counting up all the states individually. A personal hand count of the map provided in the study corrected the error. That error did not have an impact on the ranking of where the restaurants placed overall.

If it wasn't obvious enough or considered common knowledge already, it's pretty clear that we love our chicken nuggets here in America.